


Fog on the Clyde Part II

by AJHall



Series: Fog on the Clyde [2]
Category: Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow (2004)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-04
Updated: 2014-10-04
Packaged: 2018-02-19 20:59:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 28,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2402678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AJHall/pseuds/AJHall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Action moves to the Eastern side of the Atlantic, as Joe sets off to find Dex in Scotland.  Meanwhile, the shadowy villains launch a second attack on the prototype weapon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Joe visits an old friend

Charlie waved a hospitable hand toward the tumbler of whisky and soda.

"Bring it with you," he said, as he struggled to his feet from the depths of the fireside chair. Joe, caught unawares, was nonetheless on his feet before his host had completed the movement. Ignoring any awkwardness, Charlie gestured towards the door with the hand that was not currently supporting his weight.

"Always take a turn down to the stables about this time of day," he said. "Doesn't do to let the staff know you aren't still taking an interest. Besides: fresh air. Blows the cobwebs away. Do us both the world of good."

Joe glanced through the window. Beyond the rain-streaked panes the melancholy laburnums of the shrubbery could dimly be glimpsed, moulting yellow leaves to mulch into the sodden ground in the gathering dimness of an autumn evening in the English shires. He reflected, a trifle mordantly, that it was as well he'd had previous experience of the English moneyed classes at home; otherwise he'd have been inclined to suspect that what his former comrade-in-arms had suffered at Shanghai and in its aftermath had turned his brain as well as shattered that athletic body.

He was, by now, an expert at not letting his face betray his thoughts. His lips assumed a ready, assenting smile."Of course." 

The last time he had been here the dozen or so loose-boxes had all been full; liquid-eyed, mobile heads hanging over into the yard, wuffling and blowing clouds of hay-scented breath into the winter night. Joe didn't care for horses, especially. No power on earth was going to make him trust his neck to a piece of equipment with a mind of its own, and no maintenance logs he could summon for inspection, but he missed their warm, interested presence more than he could say. The green paint on the box fronts was peeling in spots, and grass was beginning to poke through the previously immaculate cobbles.

They said hello and fed apple pieces to the two chunky cobs and an aging Fell pony who now, it seemed, had fallen heir to the real estate properly occupied by generations of steeplechasers, matched carriage horses, hunters and show hacks.

"Well," Charlie said brightly, almost as if daring Joe to comment on the contrast, "should we go through to the tack-room? Rhys generally has a brew going round about now."

It was better in the tack-room. The rows of silver cups had been kept burnished, and the pinned-up rosettes, although starting to fade, were still a brave mass of colour, like a hot-house flowerbed. While Charlie stumped to the back door and shouted for the missing groom, Joe took advantage of the pause to try to steady his mind - still in a whirl following his frantic, storm-battered flight over the turbulent Atlantic, and the yet-to-be absorbed shocks of this essential, unlooked-for reunion. 

_You're here for information. Anything else is secondary._  
Determinedly, he feigned interest in the numerous examples of the saddler's art, deployed on pegs and hooks around the tack-room's whitewashed walls.

"Rhys doesn't seem to be -"

Charlie's return caught him in contemplation of an elegantly crafted side-saddle, hanging on a new set of pegs. The gloss of the new leather among so much venerable and time-smoothed tack had caught his eye, before the incongruity. But then the mystery caught and held him. Charlie's mother had scandalised the County by riding to hounds astride before the fall of the first Bonar Law administration. Charlie's sisters had moved on from ponies to mechanised transport as soon as technology had caught up with their quicksilver forward charge against the universe.

And then it hit him.

_So there's a spanking new, hand-made woman's saddle doing on this wall now? Oh God. I see. How do you earn a nickname like "360 degrees Joe" and still miss a clue like than by a ten yard margin?_

Charlie, seeing the direction of his glance, gulped and came to a sudden stop.

To break the awkwardness Joe assumed a light, bantering tone.

"Why haven't you broken the news earlier, Charlie? Well? Give. Who is she? And is it serious? Do I congratulate you? Am I to be best man?"

Charlie flushed; a slow deep purplish red that spread inevitably upwards from his collar. Part of Joe's mind noted that his clipped tone had never sounded more like his sister's as he said,"As a matter of fact, it's mine. It's the only one I use, these days."

While Joe was still fumbling through a wall of shock Charlie added, his voice seeming to come from a long distance away,"After all; how else is a man with a cork peg going to ride to hounds, eh? Ever really considered about what it might be like not to be able to bend your knee, Joe? You'd be surprised what it stops you doing. Or, at least, how much imagination and adjustment it takes? No, I thought not."

Joe was still trying to respond through a whirl of confusion and resentment - _know? Yes of course I know. Not how you adjust to being crippled in body - though when that Jap guard hovered over me with the bolt-croppers, and my fingers were spread over the Adjutant's looted desk I thought - but being crippled in spirit? Charlie, you think you can score points on me there?_ \- when the warm rumble of Rhys's voice broke in.

"You'll find, sir, there's a number of gentlemen ride side hereabouts. What with one thing and the other. Once they get used to how to shift their weight, it doesn't stop them being in the front flight at the kill. And, to my mind, sir, it's easier on the hosses."

He emerged from some remote back region of the stables bearing a loaded tray with steaming brown earthenware teapot, milk, a bowl of coarse sugar that seemed to be coagulating in the damp and a selection of Bath Oliver biscuits.

"After all," he added as he plonked the tray down on the tack-room table, "I didn't notice no-one telling the Brigadier which way he ought to be riding at the end of the last 12 mile point when they ended the wrong side of Sutton Cheney."

Joe raised his eyebrows. "The Brigadier?" he hazarded. It seemed easier than any other line of communication. Charlie looked relieved, too. He waved an explanatory arm. 

"My nearest neighbour. The VC. Lost his right leg at Vimy Ridge." He made a face. "You'd be seeing him for dinner this evening, but I'm rationing his company in order to save what's left of my sanity. There are only so many times I can listen to a superannuated fifty-eight-year old infantry officer tell me how he proposed to Franky when she was seventeen and at her Coming-Out dance, and how much more sensible it'd have been all round if she'd accepted him."

Despite himself, Joe's eyebrows rose in shock. "This old guy proposed to Franky?"

Charlie pursed his lips in an expression which might have been amusement, might have been disgust. Joe couldn't tell. "And you're telling me you didn't?"

"Well, not marriage, at any event."

The words were out before Joe could stop them. He bit his lip. However far he and Charlie went back, Charlie had been - was, dammit - RAF, not some bob-tail irregular. And Joe had learnt that the RAF had - Codes - for this sort of thing.

_Don't mention a lady's name at mess. Don't talk that way about my sister._

Even when your sister happens to be the Old Lady of the most formidable vessel the Royal Navy has ever commissioned to date, and is popularly rumoured round the Fleet (a rumour Joe knew to be untrue, for two incontrovertible reasons - not that he was proposing to discuss those with her brother, either, come to think of it) to have a double row of aces' insignia hand-embroidered on the left leg of her silk cami-knickers.

Time paused. Charlie gulped. And then, pouring tea for them all as though nothing had happened at all he said, "So, Joe. What brings you to Warwickshire after so long?"

The moment had come, the one that had caused his guts to churn in anticipation the whole way across the Atlantic, so at times he had almost hoped that the buffeting winds would flip his plane and send her to an unmarked resting place in the raging waters far below.

He gulped, and took a sip of the warm, syrupy, stewed tea. "Charlie; where in this country might Franky have hidden Dex if she wanted to?"


	2. Joe meets a brick wall in his search for Dex, and enlists an engagingly frank young lady to undermine it

"I dinna care," the fierce old Scotsman said, jutting his chin out. "For all I know you may be -"

One arthritic finger reached out and tapped down on Charlie's carefully-phrased letter of introduction. "You may be a friend of the Squadron-Leader. No doubt. Aye, and doubtless you know the Commander, also. No doubt."

His tone belied his words. He stared fiercely across his blotter at Joe. "Nonetheless; I'm sorry that I find myself unable to assist you. For one thing, were I to have the information you were seeking - which I'm no admitting, ye ken - it would have been given to me in confidence, and I'm no the man to betray a confidence. And if ye've a regard for the Commander, then ye'll no ask me to."

There was, when all was said and done, no real answer to that. Joe leaned back in his chair. With the hint of a grim smile McPherson brought the heel of his hand down on the brass bell on his desk.

A dark head poked nervously round the oak door; the secretary who had, a scant ten minutes ago, ushered him in.

"Miss Adamson," McPherson said, "kindly show Mr Sullivan out."

Once the door was safely closed behind them Miss Adamson risked a shy, ruefully friendly smile at him. "Did he growl at you? I was rather afraid he might. It's the east wind, you know. I'm pretty certain it sets off his rheumatism, though of course he'd never admit he's a sufferer. My Uncle Henry was just the same."

Joe smiled back at her. Miss Adamson's wide-set brown eyes, high broad forehead and general air of cheerfully agog interest in the world around her reminded him of a half-grown Labrador puppy.

"He growled," he confirmed. "Something fierce."

She looked sympathetic. "Oh, dear. I suppose that means he didn't listen to your pitch, either."

Joe raised an eyebrow. "Pitch?"

Miss Adamson's hand went guiltily to her mouth. "Oh, I'm sorry. I must sound most awfully nosy. And my old headmistress would tick me off for using slang, too. I just guessed - well, you looked so disappointed when you came out of Mr McPherson's office, I thought you must have been trying to get the Company to back you for something, and been turned down. We do get quite a few of them, you know. Usually it's for quite dull things like patented reduction gears and suchlike, but we did get someone in last month who was trying to get sponsorship for an overland trek to Samarkand."

She looked speculatively at Joe. He grinned at her. "Not me. I was there week before last. Not somewhere I'm planning to go back to in a hurry. Not nearly as romantic as it's cracked up to be. And absolutely not walking either. Have you seen those hills?"

Miss Adamson's brow furrowed up, making her look even more like a Labrador puppy. "Now you're teasing me."

He made his eyes wide and guileless. "If you'll take pity on me, since I'm all on my own in town this evening, and come with me to the movies, I'll tell you about it in the interval."

Propriety warred with wistfulness in her expression. "I - ah - um -"

Joe's smile was disarming. "Please? It really would be a kindness. And despite appearances I am quite respectable, you know. Even Mr McPherson acknowledged that." 

She paused, and then, rather like a diver about to launch herself off the high board, gulped and nodded. And then there was the sound of a door opening along the corridor. She made quick shooing gestures with her hands.

"Get going. If Mr McPherson finds you still here he'll kill me. See you later. 6 o'clock at the Paramount in Renfield Street?"

Belatedly, as she whisked back into whatever cubby hole they kept her in during working hours, it occurred to Joe that she had been remarkably unforthcoming on how actually he was to find the cinema, and he wondered whether she was testing him; he had, after all. asserted his ability to find his way around the wilder corners of the Earth, and so she might reasonably assume that if he was as good as he claimed that finding a large cinema in the centre of Glasgow would be child's-play to him.

It was, actually.

Miss Adamson (her name was Helen, she confided, when, vaguely mindful of the fact that he'd not actually got round to introducing himself earlier, he started to go belatedly through the formalities) was waiting for him, looking slightly apprehensive, as though she hadn't been entirely sure whether he was going to turn up or not, and now he had wasn't sure if to be pleased or anxious.

"I hope you haven't seen this one before," she said. "If you have, we could always try the Rialto - "

Joe reassured her. "Provided it isn't wall-to-wall Mickey Mouse I'll be happy." His brows narrowed together. "Or women diving into swimming pools and making flower patterns in groups with their legs in the air. But other than that I'm easy."

Helen giggled. "Actually, now you come to mention it I think that is what's on at the Rialto. So this one had better be all right, I suppose."

It was, actually; a enjoyably outrageous Gothic taradiddle, involving atmospheric thunderstorms, secret passages, multiple misunderstandings, plotters whose villainous convolutions owed nothing to any discernable rational motivations and a heroine who adhered rigidly to the Had I But Known school of thriller conventions. This, together with her refusal to trust anyone else in the entire movie with the notable exception of anyone who chose to telephone her anonymously to propose that she should meet him on her own at midnight in a remote place, led to her being involved in a seemingly unending sequence of concussions, kidnappings and life-threatening situations, from all of which the hero had to extricate her, at considerable personal risk and inconvenience and for no discernable payback in terms of gratitude.

Joe enjoyed it thoroughly.

Helen, too, presented a refreshing change from the women he was accustomed to taking to the movies. For one thing, she actually seemed to think that the object of the evening was seeing the film. She sat in rapt attention from the opening sequence to the final credits, occasionally turning to share a quick smile at one of the more far-fetched convolutions of the plot, but neither interrupting with irrelevancies or assuming that he might have his attention fixed on her presence, as opposed to whatever was happening on the screen.

In fact, it occurred to him about half-way through that it was, in some respects, reassuringly like going to a movie with Dex. Except that presumably Helen Adamson wasn't sitting there busily working out how to recreate relevant special effects in real time within the limitations imposed by the laws of physics and without the benefit of discreetly hidden wires behind the scenes which could be edited out in the final cut.

Given that his major motive behind the evening was get Helen to answer the question, "Where does your boss keep his secrets and can you suggest the best way I can burgle it?" without her spotting that he'd asked it, he had not actually expected to enjoy himself. 

And it was not just because he had yet to receive an answer to his unspoken question that he suggested she might like to join him for dinner at Rogano's after the film.

Over dinner, the floodgates of her chatter opened. She had, she confided, been rather disappointed that the expedition to Samarkand had failed to gain approval; she had rather hoped to volunteer if it had got off the ground with Company support.

"Mind you," Helen said, put her head on one side and looking at him with amused self-deprecation, "I expect I'd have had difficulty convincing the organisers that shorthand/typing were skills they absolutely couldn't live without in the Central Asian Republics."

Joe, from his experience superintending logistics and supply for several hundred men and a couple of squadrons of planes in a Far East war-zone, felt at liberty to disagree. And did so. 

"And what's more," he added, "next time I'm planning anything major in that neck of the woods, I'll certainly bear you in mind."

"Now you're just being polite," Helen said in a resigned sort of way. "Anyway, I'm not absolutely sure shorthand/typing is actually my forte. And I know the McGinty - sorry, she's our office battle-axe, she superintends all the girls - doesn't think so, either. And definitely not filing."

Joe intimated that given what he knew about the Company in general, and Mr McPherson in particular, he hardly thought she'd be holding the position she did if her opinion of her talents was anything like justified.

She shrugged. "It's nice of you to say so. But actually I don't think I'd be here at all if I wasn't some sort of third cousin twice removed of the founder of the Company."

"Really?" Joe raised his eyebrows. "You're related to Charlie and Franky Cook, then?"

Helen looked faintly surprised . "Well, pretty distantly, really. I don't suppose I've seen either of them more than twice in my life. We don't exactly move in the same circles, you know." She made meditative patterns in the white linen of the table-cloth with the tines of her fork. "You see, there were three sisters back in the 1860s or something. And the eldest married a man called Shuttleworth, and the next one married his business partner, who was a man called Cook. And the youngest one got in a panic about being left on the shelf, I think, and ended up running off with a penniless schoolteacher called Adamson who was unbelievably Worthy. And the Shuttleworths went in for being merchant princes and great inventors and making lots and lots of lolly - they're the only ones still involved in the Company, these days. And then the Cooks went all death-or-glory and went off and all became admirals and generals and things and won VCs by the cart-load. And what did the Adamsons do? Settled down in a small town in Hampshire and concentrated on being gloomily respectable, and not risking their life savings by aping their betters and never owing a farthing to anyone and being proud to say no-one in the family had ever got in the newspapers except three times in their lives when they were born, married or died, that's what. Huh!"

As she appeared sunk in gloom at the thought, Joe took the opportunity of topping up her wineglass. 

She looked at it dubiously, but took a swig anyway. He briefly considered posing his burglary request directly, but rejected the idea. The Cook tendency to be fiercely loyal to their own might well inhibit her from acting directly against her employer, and he had gained enough respect for Helen Adamson's brains over his brief acquaintance with her not to relish any prospect of turning her into an active enemy.

Skirting around the subject, he said lightly, "Anyway, I haven't given up on McPherson yet. Tell me, how's the best way of approach him when his rheumatism isn't troubling him? Does he have any hobbies? What about golf?"

She looked faintly surprised. "You know, up to about a couple of weeks ago I'd have said he hadn't an interest outside the Company. But you know what? He's suddenly taken up Art, with a capital A, completely out of the blue."

Joe's pulse quickened. Two weeks ago - yes, the timing was too close for coincidence, surely. And if the dour McPherson had suddenly turned into an aesthete, then he, Joe, was a Dutchman.

"Art?" he said, with just the right blend of stunned disbelief and piqued interest in his voice. 

Helen nodded eagerly. "I know; you really wouldn't think it, would you? I'd have betted that he thought _The Monarch of the Glen_ was the high watermark of Western art and culture. But a couple of weeks ago - Saturday afternoon - I went in to the museum in Kelvingrove - it's a jolly good place to spend Saturday, actually, if you're at loose ends and want somewhere warm to go which doesn't cost anything - and I spotted him going through the exhibition - really doing it slowly and making notes about the pictures and everything. I dodged him, naturally. I mean; I hardly wanted to have to make small talk with the boss on my afternoon off. But I thought at the time it was a bit out of character. And then, only this afternoon - after you'd gone - he had me run out and get him the catalogue for this touring exhibition of German painters that's opening tomorrow at the Art School; that very avant-garde one the papers have had such a lot of fun being rude about - you know: women with green faces and too many - um, rather peculiar figures, and so forth - and made me send it to some friend of his, with a note saying that he hoped it might be of interest, and perhaps they could see each other there. And he's actually taking the afternoon off, tomorrow!"

The tone in which she dropped this bombshell told its own story. McPherson had, presumably, taken a half day for the Armistice, and perhaps for the Coronation, but Joe had no doubt whatsoever that if he was taking half a day to inspect some collection of ghastly daubs which probably looked equally bad upside down as the right way up, as if anyone including the original artists themselves were able to tell the difference, that he must have a thumping good reason for it. And Joe was determined to find out what that reason was.

"Um," he said thoughtfully, "art. Well, I'll have to think about it. Perhaps I could try bumping into him accidentally-on-purpose there, and see if he was less sticky out of the office. Where did you say the exhibition was, again?"

She told him, together with the time of its opening. And then Joe casually allowed the conversation to drift onto other subjects. He enjoyed the rest of the evening, too. It was only when he had seen her safely home and retraced his steps to his own hotel that he allowed himself a fierce, exultant flicker of triumph. Despite Franky and McPherson's best efforts to baffle him, he was sure he had picked up Dex's trail. And he was not, if he knew anything about it, going to let it grow cold.


	3. Joe takes up Art as a means to an end, and encounters an adversary worthy of his steel

Joe withdrew hurriedly into the shelter provided by a conveniently massive Victorian sculpture of Lacoon and his sons as McPherson strode past him out of the gallery and down the stairs. Through the coils of writhing serpents he peered cautiously to check that the old Scotsman was not looking back. He also took the opportunity of a quick assessment of what the other man, the stranger who Joe was now convinced was the key to Dex's whereabouts, was up to. He was still at the far end of the gallery; apparently engrossed in a careful perusal of the exhibition, and making notes on his catalogue. Joe, strolling with apparent casualness, passed him moving on into the next room of the exhibition, deploying his own catalogue so as to obscure his face as he did so.

The next room contained a nightmarish collection of works by a group of German modernists or Vorticists or Whirligigists or whatever they chose to call themselves. By far the worst was a lunatic group of tormented-looking oils, none measuring less than eight feet by six, by one A. Hitler. Joe amused himself for a few moments composing a stiff letter of complaint to whichever misguided soul had persuaded the unknown artist to give up his day job.

The echo of sturdy boots striding determinedly over bare polished gallery flooring from the next room gave Joe the clue he needed. His quarry was on the move. 

Unhurriedly, with the air of someone who has had all the culture he can reasonably take for one day, Joe strolled back into the next gallery, noting the back of the stranger's Burberry vanishing down the stairs. He followed briskly, and suppressed an urge to swear when he came across the stranger bent over at the foot of the gallery stairs, apparently wrestling with a recalcitrant bootlace. Left without option, Joe, keeping his eyes dead ahead and whistling slightly, continued with unbroken pace out of the gallery and into the street.

There was a tobacconist conveniently located on the other side of the road. Joe strolled into it and, slightly randomly, purchased a packet of throat lozenges, a box of matches and twenty Woodbines. Fortunately, an elaborately gilded and decorated mirror hung behind the tobacconist's head. In its dim and speckled depths he caught a glimpse of his quarry coming down the steps of the gallery, shooting a swift, assessing glance to left and right, and then, apparently satisfied that he was unobserved, setting off at a brisk trot eastwards.

Joe paid, dropped his purchases into the pockets of his own Burberry, concluded his brief, desultory exchange with the tobacconist about the prospects of Celtic for Saturday, and left the shop. The stranger was heading towards a tram-stop. Joe took care to keep behind the hurrying throng on the street, his soft hat drawn well down on his head.  
The tram drew up; the waiting passengers piled aboard. Joe, calculating his moment to a nicety, swung aboard just as it was moving off. A sidelong glance told him that the stranger was about halfway down the tram. Joe took a seat just near the door, and was relieved when the person sitting next to him got off at the next stop. He shuffled along the hard wooden seat to the window, turning his face away from the inside of the tram to peer out into the gathering gloom, projecting an air of surly uncommunicativeness and shielding his face from scrutiny by his fellow passengers. When a large woman with a multiplicity of shopping bags sat down next to him on the outer seat, completing the effectiveness of the screen, he could have kissed her.

The tram rumbled on; from what Joe could tell through the steamed up, grimy window the districts through which it was passing were getting more down-at-heel with every passing stop. The elegant shops and stylish restaurants started to be replaced by second-hand furniture dealers and fried fish shops. There were, too, the signs of increasing industrialisation; from time to time they passed foundries, shaking with noises, screeching with steam, and the glow of the furnaces in the gathering dusk giving them the air of being outposts of hell.

The passengers were thinning out; the tram was obviously getting close to the end of the line. Joe was just beginning to wonder whether the stranger had detected his presence and decided to call his bluff by proceeding on with him until they found themselves the only two passengers left at the terminus, when he caught a glimpse of reflected motion in the window. His quarry had risen and was coming down the central aisle. Joe, hurriedly, turned his own head away. The bell rang; the tram lurched to a stop, and the stranger descended. 

The second the tram was in motion again Joe made a brief, exasperated exclamation, and leapt to his feet, brushing past the large lady with the parcels with a muttered apology, and caught the tram conductor on the shoulder.

"Sorry, but please could you tell me what was that last stop? I'm beginning to think I've may have been carried on past where I should have got off."

He adopted the silly-ass tones of one of Charlie's mess-mates; a fatuous-looking man who, before his luck ran out over Shanghai at the hands of a ground-based anti-aircraft gunner, had been one of the coolest and most deadly RAF fliers Joe had ever known. It had its effect. Everyone on the tram goggled at him in concert, rather as though he had removed his soft hat only to reveal he had a unicorn's horn on his brow.

Joe smiled disarmingly, and added the wholly superfluous information,"You see; I'm a stranger in town."

An elderly man in flat cap and muffler seated on one of the nearer seats said, "Ye dinna say? Weel, that explains how ye cam not tae reecognise McAllister and Smalleys' works; even when the mon himself was travelling with us at the time."

Joe's heart leapt. Once he had rejected the idea of following his quarry off at the same stop - it might have worked had there been a crowd alighting at the same stop, which was what he had hoped for when he boarded the tram in the first place - his plan had been to find the name of the neighbourhood, leap off at the next stop, and hope to pick up the cooling trail by racing back along the tram-lines in the hope his quarry would not have hopelessly vanished into the maze of little shops and blackened factories before he got there.

Now, it seemed, he was at last getting a break. He leaned easily against one of the wooden tram seats, and said, "And who would that be?" 

The elderly man looked at him suspiciously. "And what interest would ye have in knowing?"

Joe's mind raced. What interest, indeed, could he possibly have in pursuing enquiries about random strangers? For that matter, what possible legitimate business could a person of the background his borrowed accent had just indelibly proclaimed him to be have in this part of town at all?

Except -

With a bubbling sense of hilarity - it was, after all, in at least one sense so hideously, incredibly appropriate - he turned towards the old man, and said,"Oh, didn't I say? Beastly rude of me. You must have thought me most frightfully nosy. I'm a journalist, don't you know. And my editor's got a bee in his bonnet that a series of articles on how the industrial heartland of Britain is recovering after the Depression will be just what our readers want to read. Uplifting, you see. Splendid chance for the subs to write patriotic headlines: "How Britain Bounced Back" and all that. Full of local colour. Anecdotes about impressive local characters. That sort of thing."

He pulled out the Woodbines from his pocket, and offered his informant one, lighting one for himself when the other accepted.

The remaining handful of passengers on the tram looked even more impressed. One of them - a wiry, hard-bitten man with half his face pocked and bitten with the scars of what Joe assessed as most probably powder burns from a damp rifle misfiring at close quarters - expressed the opinion that if the newspapers down in London had taken it into their heads to put Andrew McAllister into their pages they had more sense than he'd ever been inclined to give them credit for. Another - an equally hard-bitten type with his forearms (heroically bare in the November gloom) entwined with the tattooed sea-serpents that Joe would have been prepared to swear were the peculiar hallmark of a half-Cherokee, quarter-Irish practitioner of the art who plied his trade in the narrow streets which run up from the dockside in Valetta - opined that if the newspaper were to describe McAllister with anything approaching accuracy then the London readers would be hard put to believe it.

"Because," he added pungently, "to hear the Londoners talk, you'd think there was no-one North of the Border but bare-naked savages, and they idiots into the bargain."

Joe made his eyes light up with interest. To say the truth, it hardly required much acting. 

"Oh, look here; this stuff sounds like exactly the sort of thing my editor wants me to bring back. Tell me more about this Mr McAllister?"

Te tattooed one (who had mentioned in passing that his name was Jamie) said, "Well, as ye've seen, he's no the man to waste a ha'pence on himself where he can avoid it. No takes a tram where he can walk, ye understand, and doesna keep a car or anything o' that sort, though he's been the sole owner of that business since 1932, and has the reputation of being a very warm man indeed."

There was a murmur of assent from the interior of the tram; plainly this trait met with the general approval of the frugal people of the neighbourhood.

Jamie wagged a finger. "He's careful, but he's no mean, you ken. You'll be aware we've been suffering somewhat awfu' with the influenzey in this district? No? Well, it seems a day or so ago Mr McAllister's foreman was taken real bad with it at the bench - temperature of 106 degrees and all - and what did Mr McAllister do?"

He paused impressively, and then wagged his finger again. "Nothing else but send the man home back to his lodgings in a cab at his own expense, that's what he did."

There was a collective awed indrawn breath which rippled through the tram, and the pock-marked man (who appeared to answer to the name of Douggie) whistled through broken teeth, and said, "Man! McAllister must have some regard for him."

Unexpectedly, another voice piped up from a seat towards the front of the tram."Would McAllister's foreman be the wee Yankee laddie who settled Geordie McGeown's hash for him?"

Douggie looked across at the new speaker, a thin dark-haired man with sunken cheeks, intensely bright glittering eyes, and a persistent, hacking cough.

"He would be that, Angus. Oh, and I've heard tell it was a grand fight, right enough. Geordie McGeown swaggering out of the workshop for all the world as if he was the Cock of the North, and next thing he knew he was on his back in the gutter, spitting his two front teeth back out from where the wee Yankee boy had pushed them. Man! I'd have given a tooth of my own to have seen it."

Joe hung on to his assumed persona with a Herculean effort. "Well, this all sounds like absolutely wonderful stuff. Perhaps I -"

The tram lurched to a sudden halt, and all three of his informants, as well as most of the rest of the passengers, rose to leave. The frustration of being so close to finding Dex - and clearly he needed finding, being evidently seriously ill on top of all the rest of it - and losing it at this late stage almost drove Joe to distraction. He tried a last desperate throw. 

"Perhaps, if you aren't in too much of a hurry to get straight home, you'll let me buy you a drink or so and you can tell me about it." He giggled again. "Editor's expenses. Of course."

He put his hand into his Burberry pocket and allowed himself to jingle the handful of change that lay inside.

The three men's eyes swivelled towards him. Jamie nodded. "Oor local will be the Duke of Argyll," he informed him. "We'll be seeing you there in the Public -"  
He assessed Joe, and abruptly seemed to change his opinion. "We'll be sending someone round to the Lounge Bar to collect you in a quarter o' an hoor. Because, you ken, Angus might be advised to make his excuses at home first, if you were minded to make it a long talk, with him not long being married, ye ken, and the mistress fretting as it is with her at the moment if he's late home without explanation. And Douggie here knows of a laddie or so who you might be interested in talking to, also."

He smiled, disarmingly, into Joe's eyes. Not without a flicker of that same hilarity he had felt earlier, Joe noted that if he had been the gumptionless London journalist of his creation, he would now be on the point of being taken for all he might be presumed to be worth, and then some.

As things were - Jamie, Douggie and Angus had absolutely no idea of how much more valuable to him their information was than anything they might be proposing to make him pay for it. And he certainly wasn't planning to enlighten them until he'd wrung them dry. He assented eagerly to their proposition.

The tram came to a halt, and they disembarked to go their - temporarily - separate ways. And none of them remarked upon a ragged little figure sitting at the back of the tram, who ducked himself well down behind the seat-back as they were leaving. And none of them heard the same urchin - a ten-year old ruffian known as Wee Tammie throughout the length and the breadth of the Broomielaw - declare haughtily to the conductor, upon his subsequent detection - the tram then having rounded the terminus and being well on its return journey to the city centre - that, "He didna doot that Meester McAllister o' McAllister and Smalley would see the Tram Company right once he heard the news he had for him." 

Approximately thirty seconds later Wee Tammie - spitting with rage, howling imprecations and the beneficiary of a thick ear at the hands of the conductor - was summarily ejected into the night. And, shaking a fist at the departing lights of the tram, which seemed to be jingling its bells in pure mockery of him, he set off with head bowed but spirit unbroken against the driving wind in undeterred pursuit of the man himself.

His reading of the penny dreadfuls and Sexton Blakes that fell occasionally in his way, and which were seized upon with the avid hunger of a passionate reader forever starving for his proper fodder, had told him that the tendrils of the international villain's organisation could stretch even so far as to encompass a humble conductor for the Glasgow and Paisley Combined Electric Tramways Corporation. And the only thing for a hero to do was to meet everything thrown at him with dauntless courage and bottomless ingenuity.

Two days later the Managing Director of the Tramway Company was surprised to receive a hand-delivered envelope, containing the princely sum of twopence half-penny and a civil note to the effect that Mr Andrew McAllister presented his compliments and had pleasure in tendering the debt he believed himself owing to the Company, trusting that in the light of the amount concerned and the shortness of the time that it had been outstanding the Company would be minded to overlook the question of interest.

Like Wee Tammie, Andrew McAllister had great faith in the merits of always going to the top when dealing with any organisation.


	4. McAllister, realising Dex is being pursued, decides to intervene

Every joint in Dex's body ached. Each breath he took had to force its way past the steel bands that somehow seemed to have been wrapped around his chest. He dipped in and out of consciousness, and swirled intermittently off into fever dreams, where creatures of nightmare became flesh, the walls of his rooms bulged in around him and the cracked and discoloured plasterwork of the sloping ceiling pressed down upon him as though he had been entombed alive.

There was a noise outside from the landing; his landlady's protesting voice and another, deeper one raised in argument. The sound beat upon his aching head like hammer-blows.  
The door opened, and a shaft of light cut across the room. He was unable to suppress a whimper of discomfort as it assaulted his over-sensitive vision, stabbing red-hot skewers deep into the recesses of his skull. He turned over, trying to bury his head in his pillows, just praying that whatever it was would stop. Just stop. And leave him to carry on dying, and the sooner the better; good riddance to him.

He became, dimly, aware that someone was shaking him by the shoulder. With an enormous effort Dex cleared his vision enough to blink stupidly up from his nest amid the sweat-soaked sheets and recognise his employer. An emergency, then, at the workshop, and a serious one, too: McAllister was not one to roust a sick man out of bed except in the direst need. Dex would swear to that.

"Wha-? What's up? What do you need me to do?" He started up in the bed, and flung back the bedclothes, preparatory to swinging his feet to the floor. McAllister clucked solicitously at him, and pulled the bedclothes back over him with a firm hand.

"Don't be over-exerting yourself, laddie," he admonished him. "You're going to have need of all your strength in a wee bitty while. Just for the moment, though, you lie back and Mrs MacMillan will be getting you a cup of hot beef-tea, for you to be drinking while we talk."

Mrs MacMillan, evidently within earshot from her position on the landing, delivered herself of a loud snort. McAllister continued to look steadily in her direction, until with a flounce she admitted defeat, turning on her heel and storming off down the bare boards of the last flight of stairs which led up to this attic room. It was not until she had returned with the beef-tea, McAllister had closed the door firmly behind her, and Dex was propping himself up against the iron bedframe, cupping his hands around the tepid, greasy brew that the older man spoke again.

"I'm no the man to pry into another's affairs, but it occurs to me that you may have left those behind in America you'd not be willing to have find out where you might be at present, is that not right?"

It took a second for his words to sink in. Then they did, and Dex had no need to blame the influenza for the sudden irruption of the stuff of nightmare into his life. For how could the old Calvinist engineer possibly comprehend what he had done, and why? Had he even heard, in his narrow existence bounded by idealistic philosophy on the one hand, and his rigid moral rectitude on the other, of the kind of man Dex was? And McAllister had been so kind to him, when he had needed a quiet, unpresuming kindliness more than anything else on earth. Somehow the fear that McAllister might feel his kindness betrayed hurt more, even, than the certain humiliation of being unmasked.

He tried, abruptly, to stutter something - anything - some form of explanation, at least. His throat was too choked with emotion and illness combined to get anything intelligible through. 

McAllister put a hand on his arm. "I said, I'm no the man to pry, and I meant it. Whatever brought you here's between you and your conscience, laddie. As for me, you come vouched for by a man I have a long regard for - aye, even when it seems there's scarcely an idea me and Davey McPherson have in common these days - and I've made my own observations, these past few days, also. And as I've said before, there's a level of truth at the very heart of engineering that I think you'd be hard pressed to find in any other field of human endeavour. And you're the finest engineer I've ever met in half a century of practice in the field. It's no for me to question Providence, ye understand, but I'd no lightly believe ye'd be counted among the reprobate."

He got up, almost bumping his head on the ceiling where it sloped down to the window, beyond the foot of the bed.

"Anyway, that's by the by. As I said, your safety was entrusted to me by a man I have a regard for. And I'm not about to shirk a duty."

Dex gritted his teeth and tried to focus. That was the trouble with influenza; not only did it leave you weak, aching and weary but somehow it also had the power to turn your brain into cotton candy. "What's happened?"

McPherson shrugged. "It seems there's been a man asking after you. And from what we can gather, it doesn't seem likely he's the laddie to have your best interests at heart, either."

Dex gave a quick, strangled gasp; his mind squirrelled round. Could the photographs have found their way into the hands of the authorities? But surely the Vice cops would hardly have followed him so far; be glad, probably, that he'd taken himself and his perversions off to be Old Europe's problem rather than theirs. It was, his reading over the last decade had taught him, something of a tradition - at least, for those with enough money to indulge it. Except - his heart lurched. The prototype. If the authorities were brought to connect the two - to believe that he had connived at its theft, because of the hold over him those photographs represented - they would presumably be pursuing him for treason, not merely immorality - which meant a capital charge - the humiliation of trial first, for him and all of his, and then of course the chair -

His nerves twitched, reflexively, as though already feeling the voltage jolting through them.

But there was no guarantee that it was the authorities who were pursuing him. Those shadowy figures who had stolen the prototype in the first place must by now have discovered all there was to discover about its utility in hostile - or at least, uninformed - hands. They would, in all likelihood, be out for revenge for that alone.

Dex shuddered. Either way, he was too dispirited to run, and too weak to fight. 

McAllister looked sharply at him, but continued unbrokenly with what he had been saying before. "Anyway, I've not met him myself, ye ken, but I've had discussions with those who have. Davey McPherson says he came into his office, bold as brass, with a letter of introduction he claimed was from a man who was kin to one of the company's founders; as if he expected Davey McPherson to be soft enough not to know the man concerned has been all but a recluse since he was crippled a few years ago, poor body, and not likely to be writing letters of introduction for anyone, still less some flash laddie in a Yankee suit. And then Wee Tammie brought me his story. Now, there's a lad with his wits about him: I must have a mind to him. It's no his fault his lot fell on the stony ground, and the seed is good, it seems. Something ought to be done. Anyway, it would seem I was followed, this afternoon, from my meeting with Davey McPherson. I had a suspicion such was the case, and Tammie got a good view of the man, and it would seem to be the same as approached Davey McPherson. Wee Tammie took a scunner to him, ye ken. "Voice like the BBC, but no just truly the BBC," was his opinion. By which I take it that the accent was no his natural voice. Tammie said he was spending money like water and asking questions he'd no right business asking."

There was a grim smile on McPherson's face. "I understand he'll be doing so in the Duke of Argyll this very minute. And no cheaply, at that. I've sent a man along to try to deal with it, but I'd not care to speculate what may have been let slip before he gets there. And it's no secret that you lodge with Catriona McMillan."

He looked speculatively at Dex, who was curled round himself trying to take it all in. "So; it would be best if I found you alternative lodging for the time being. And we've no overmuch time. And as you won't, it seems, be able to get there under your own steam, I've taken the liberty of arranging transport for you. And it's on its way, so I'd best be helping you pack."

"What -? Where -?"

McAllister, casting his eyes about, detected Dex's kitbag and started stuffing clothes into it before he resumed speaking. "Ye ken that rush job we were working on before you took sick? The repairs to the gate for the sea-lock at Ardrishaig?"

Dex nodded; there was a sudden spurt of anxiety. "Did the men cope, after all? There was some tricky machining -"

McAllister grinned. "My hands don't have so much of the rheumatics about them, nor is my back so stiff that I can't pick up an oxyacetylene cutter if the need drives, even these days. And being the boss, ye only have to get your hands dirty the once and the men fall over themselves to show they can outdo ye; in skill and speed, aye. Yes; we finished the job. And it's on a truck on its way to meet the Annie Laurie this very evening. And ye'll be travelling with it."

Dex tried to make his dulled brain focus. " The Annie Laurie?"

McAllister looked rather as though he was attempting to explain the ABC to a rather backward six-year old."The puffer, ye ken. Skipper McKechnie's boat. The finest outside boat in the West Highlands. She'll be off doun the watter on the evening ebb. And I keep a wee bothy a step above Otter Ferry. A simple enough place, but well set-up for my needs. Times I go there to catch up on reading, and thinking. It's easy enough to lose the still small voice among the bustle of the city. And I've an arrangement with the housekeeper at the manse nearby; if I send her a telegram she'll see the fires are lit, and the bothy provisioned, oh aye, and she'll step up the track to keep an eye on ye once McKechnie drops you off there. Doubtless it'll be no more than for a day or so. The flash laddie will lose interest in throwing his dirty money about when he finds my people are no so cheap to buy as he thinks at present. And it's a grand place for a convalescence. The air itself will set you up, without anything else."

He finished throwing the last of Dex's few possessions into the kitbag, and cocked his head on one side. There was a distant rumble, as of wheels over rough cobbles. To Dex's fevered mind they were reminiscent of the tumbrils in the movie he'd seen of Tale of Two Cities , approaching to bring him to the guillotine.  
"Well, laddie, we'd best be on our way."

Supporting - indeed, half-carrying - Dex against his shoulder, McAllister took him down the multiple flights of stairs to Mrs MacMillan's back door.  
Dex's final, inconsequential thought was that he'd left the last package of his carefully hoarded gum in the top drawer of the dressing table. But it seemed too much effort, and almost churlish to mention it. And then the lorry was upon them, and it was all too late.


	5. McAllister's machinations put Joe in a tight spot, and he has to take drastic action to escape

The pub's yellow gaslights blurred into an even more mellow light when viewed through the blue haze of the smoke of innumerable gaspers. In fact, as the night wore on the atmosphere in the pub became increasingly impenetrable.

Protective camouflage, one might say. For those native to the territory.

Joe - who had drunk many fewer of the drinks he had pressed to his lips over the last few hours than those watching him could possibly have guessed, and who could in point of fact actually have drunk all of them and still be upright and making sense - giggled inanely.

"Give me a moment."

He drifted vaguely across the bar, a helpful bar-maid directing him towards the alley-way at the back, the direction she - reasonably at that - assumed he was seeking.  
On gaining the sanctuary of the odoriferous back-alley behind the pub which led to the gentlemen's conveniences, he looked backwards. His view was restricted - a narrow sliver of brightness into the crowded warmth of the pub. It was, nevertheless, as he suspected. The dark-haired, earnest man in the blue jersey and torn aquascutum who had come into the pub perhaps half an hour ago was taking advantage of Joe's absence further to distribute the poison that Joe - relying on his pose of blithe and increasingly inebriated stupidity to prevent the stranger realising that the observed had become the observer - had detected him spreading from the moment of his arrival.

Joe had felt the atmosphere in the warm pub chill suddenly around him; he had lived long enough on the edges of the wild places of the world to know when a crowd has been primed to turn into a mob. He had to get out now. Or risk being beaten to within an inch of his life. If they even gave him that inch.

The enemy were, thank God, Glaswegians. With a momentary lingering flash of humour he recollected that their assumptions that he would not abandon a perfectly respectable Burberry which was currently hanging on the pub's hatstand would buy him a few minutes grace at least. He shinned over the stinking wall, dropped into the ginnel behind, racing for the lights of the main road, and the nearest tram stop.

He was not impeded in his blind flight to safety. Once aboard the first tram which arrived he pulled out a piece of paper and with a few quick strokes of a pencil jotted down a rough sketch map, giving the directions he'd managed to extract from his unwitting informants. He was going to have to move fast; the speed with which the enemy had turned the tide against him in the pub suggested that the shadowy adversary who lurked somewhere in this fog possessed no common degree of influence. Or intelligence.

Catriona MacMillan's lodging house was a narrow-fronted, three storied building that shrieked gloomy respectability. In fact, Joe thought, giving it a swift overview from the corner of the street, it embodied in stuccoed brick all the narrow, mean-spirited values which Helen had asserted were the prerogative of her Adamson relatives. It was a fortress that was not going to be readily taken by charm, a glib tongue, or the flashing of a well-filled notecase.

He looked at his chrono. Even if such an approach would not have already been pre-empted by his adversary, the hour was far too late even to contemplate the bold step of knocking on Mrs MacMillan's front door and demanding to see "Mikey". He retreated round the back, to see if the fortress was perhaps vulnerable to being attacked from the rear - and what he saw there caused him to retreat rapidly into the blessedly concealing fog.

Someone - a flat-capped, overall-clad someone - flung up the tailboard of the lorry that had been parked directly behind Mrs MacMillan's, and bolted it closed. The lorry's engine, which had been idling, roared to life; its red tail-lights winked on and it rattled off into the night. Joe cursed under his breath. It was almost certainly too late, but he eyed up the back of the house anyway. There was an open window about half-way up, and an impressively robust cast-iron drainpipe conveniently located. In less than half a minute Joe had broken in.

He found himself on a landing which moved softly along until he came to the stairs. Up or down? He flipped a mental coin, and went ghost-like up the bare boards of the next flight. The two attic rooms faced each other; the door of the right hand one was open a crack. Joe eased it a little further open.The room was empty, but the bed had been made up; the rumpled bedclothes showed that someone had lately been sleeping there. Joe put a hand on the sheet; there was a lingering warmth suggesting that the bed's occupant had only recently arisen. But the room was otherwise bare with no trace of the occupant's personal possessions. He wandered over to the cheap deal dresser and in a vague hope of obtaining some clue started opening its drawers.

Bingo!

The small brightly coloured packet of gum told him all he needed to know. The only problem now was to find out where the lorry had gone. He was prepared to bet serious money that Dex must have been aboard it. He pocketed the gum, tiptoed back down the stairs, and let himself out through the window. Climbing down the drainpipe proved slightly harder than climbing up it had been. It was with distinct relief he dropped the last few feet to the back alley, landing almost soundlessly on his rubber-soled feet.

There was a cough close by his ear.

"Man," said a voice from out of the fog, "it would seem ye take your journaleestic duties awfu' seriously."

Joe spun on the spot. 

A figure - lurching slightly and reeking powerfully of whisky, leaned in towards him. "But that may be because you're no a journalist."

The man's spittle spattered Joe's face. Joe took a step backwards. 

The man grinned at him, revealing a mouth full of broken teeth. "They were saying doon the pub that ye'll be a Yankee detective, maybe. And maybe I could be putting a name to the laddie ye'll be seeking, also."

Joe needed little effort to assume an attitude of cool hauteur. "Oh? And what interest might you have in my affairs?"

The broken toothed man put his head on one side, eying Joe with an air of befuddled craftiness."Maybe I might know where the man concerned is awa' to. Running like a fox to ground the moment he learned ye were on his tail. And maybe I might be after telling you. Were you to make it worth my while, ye ken. After all, if ye've troubled to come this far to find him, nae doot there's a fair price on his head. And I'm no asking ye to share it. Just for a wee commission, as it might be."

Joe paused, momentarily. Everything about this man was repellent - his barely veiled loathing for Dex in and of itself inspired Joe with a passionate longing to see whether it would be possible for him to make a worse mess of the stranger's face than fate had already provided. It would be a challenge, certainly - not only had his nose evidently been broken more than once - the most recent, if Joe was any judge, mere days ago, probably at the same time he'd acquired the now-yellowing black eye - but among the mouthful of blackened or yellowing stumps which filled the stranger's mouth there was a major gap where the two front incisors should be, which added a touch of peculiar horror to a smile which, Joe guessed, was intended both to be disarming and ingratiating.

Abruptly, Joe recalled a few snippets of admiring gossip on a tram, and made a connection. Whatever else Dex needed from him, this particular battle was one that he didn't need anyone else to fight on his behalf. He had, quite evidently, already won it comprehensively.

"Weel?" the man demanded. "Are ye no interested in what I have to tell ye?"

That strain of almost beserker hilarity that had beset him intermittently between the gloom and near-despair of the last hideous few days welled up again. Life was so hideously screwed up that the only human response possible except gibbering idiocy was hysterical laughter.

Joe kept his face disinterested, almost sneering. "It might be worth something to me, yes. But I'm not buying a pig in a poke. You'll have to prove your information's worth something to me."

The stranger sneered back. "Aye? And what sort of fool do you take me for? If I was soft enough to tell you absent payment in advance, I doot I'd see ye for dust."

Joe drew a deep breath. Actually paying this repellent individual for information went completely against every instinct. But he was rapidly running out of options, and there was, at least, one thing that this informant possessed which his others of the evening did not: a genuine desire that Dex should be found. And that might be for all the wrong reasons, but it nevertheless made the information pure gold, no matter how murky the waters in which he had to pan to extract it. He made up his mind.

"Here's the deal," he said abruptly. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out his wallet and extracted a five pound Bank of England note.

The stranger's eyes glittered, he half-stretched out a hand.

Joe pasted a cold, distant smile on his lips. "Not so fast." 

Very slowly, very deliberately he tore the note in two. The stranger gulped. 

"Now," Joe said, conscious that he now had the stranger's undivided attention, "I'm proposing to give you half of this note in exchange for the information you're about to tell me. And then, provided always it's the genuine article - I'll undertake to post you the other half of the note as soon as I've checked it out. After all; it won't be of any use to me, will it?"

The stranger was inclined to bluster a little, but the lure of the money was too powerful, as Joe had guessed it would be. He scribbled an address onto a torn scrap of paper, and held it out to Joe. Joe, in turn, exchanged it for half the note.

"Weel," the stranger said, "ye'll understand I'm no aware just exactly where they'll have taken him. And it'd be cheating ye were I to say otherwise. But he's away on Skipper McKechnie's boat, the _Annie Laurie_. She's late on her tide as it is. And she must be at Ardrishaig the morn. If ye get after her, maybe they'll no have landed the mon by the time you catch up with her. Or maybe you'll be able to find from one of the crew where they dropped him. It should no be difficult for a man of your ingenuity. There's no that mony Yankees in Cowal and West Argyll."

And his gap-toothed smile spread craftily over his face again as he tucked the half note into his jacket, and turned away. Before he did so he half turned back, tossing his final remark back over his shoulder. "And once ye've found him, I'd be obliged if you could pass on a message. It would give me no considerable satisfaction to have him know this: tell him when you catch him it was Geordie McGeown who put ye on to him, will ye?"

"Oh, I will," Joe breathed. "Trust me, I will."

But by that time the stranger had faded away into the fog. Within seconds, Joe was heading rapidly and almost silently away, too. The neighbourhood could hardly be said to be healthy for him, and in any event he needed to find someone from whom he could beg, borrow or steal transport, so he could take off in pursuit of the _Annie Laurie_ instantly.


	6. Dex recalls his past as the future unrolls

He was dreaming - though it seemed so like reality he could barely tell the difference - but then, so much of the last few days had been like that, with him. He ran on endlessly through fog, the sounds of pursuit close behind him, doomed to wander forever in some high cold empty place.

The dream changed: he was back in the bothy - someone was outside, he'd heard a motor-cycle engine roar closer, and then stutter to a stop. The door of the bothy opened - he dreamt that, and he dreamt the biting wind from outside and the eternal rain of the West Highlands spattering in upon his face. He had lived with the fear of discovery over the last few weeks, and so reared up out of the tangled bedclothes, pressing backwards against the wall, his heart racing, his skin clammy with sweat. In the dream he heard a voice saying, "Ssh. It's only me. Get back to sleep."

And he knew - with the absolute certainty that is only accessible to the mad and to those who dream - that against all hope he had reached safe haven at last. He turned over on his pillow and sank into untroubled sleep for the first time in weeks.

A weak yellow sunlight was straggling in through the grimy panes of the bothy when he woke. Although his limbs were weak and shaky the fever had left them; his eyes were clear of the hectic fog that had clouded his vision for so long, and the acrid taste had left his mouth. The peat-reek from the fireplace added a savoury piquancy to the air, and he thought, with the languidness of an invalid on the turning point toward recovery, that if someone were to offer him food now he could almost bear to eat it.

He turned over in the bed, towards the fire, relishing that he could move without his joints setting up an aching chorus of protest - and came to an abrupt stop.

Joe lay curled on the hearthrug in a tangle of blankets, his hair tousled and about two days' growth of beard on his chin sparkling dark-gold in the sunshine. As if alerted by Dex's quick, instantly suppressed exhalation of shock, Joe turned in his cocoon, those unmistakable long-lashed eyes prising open just enough to look at him, his whole face lighting with his smile.

"Dex? Next time, leave a forwarding address, there's a good boy."

With that he turned over, burying his head in his blankets, and the sound of his slow even breathing - almost, though not quite, a snore - filled the bothy once again.  
Dex watched him as he slept. It had always been a sly, guilty pleasure to watch the Captain when he knew his scrutiny to be unobserved; to revel in the play of his muscles under a close-fitting T-shirt, or the way his mouth crinkled at the corners and his eyes blazed when he laughed. This time, however, Dex watched him with the desperate intense precision that informed him that time when he'd had to memorise a prototype torpedo launcher in the hope he could reverse-engineer the blue-print against the clock from visual recollection alone.

He needed to be sure his precise engineer's memory had caught the smallest detail. After all, this day - the next hour or so - would be the last chance he'd ever have to watch the Captain. For the Captain couldn't possibly know anything at all about the photographs, or he wouldn't have granted him that amused, accepting, relaxed smile as he stirred in his sleep, acknowledged him, and sank back again into oblivion.

Dex was damned if he was going to continue lying to him. He was a very long way from home, and he was so awfully tired. And the Captain needed to know that he wasn't worth saving, and that he needed to let him go, let him wander back out into the fog. His memory went back, fitfully to everything that had brought him here (he was, in a sense, saying goodbye to his life, and didn't they say drowning men saw all their past lives, as if drowning itself weren't bad enough?)

He remembered Professor Przevosniak, back when he was fourteen. He'd been in the public library, puzzling through some mathematical problem of glorious irrelevance to his mundane existence; handicapped by his lack of knowledge of the intervening steps. He'd briefly considered and dismissed going to Mr Halsey, his high-school teacher.  
It had been a not-terribly-funny joke in the school that he knew more that Mr Halsey did. And had done so for some years now. And that however careful he was to express proper respect for his teacher, both of them were fully aware of it, nonetheless. Which had earned him a few canings on the hand for "insolence", come to think of it.

He had been trying to puzzle through some difficult questions when a thick accent from above his left ear said, "You struggle? Wait a moment. I go; find you the book you need."

So he had, dropping onto the desk in front of him a small green-canvas-bound volume called something engagingly catchy like "Novel Applications of Binomial Theory, And Certain Indications Towards Possible Advanced Developments of The Same" which had, according to the flyleaf, last been checked out from the library in 1903 and which turned out to answer all his current puzzlements, as well as pose him twenty more even harder questions in their place, to boot.

Blissfully, he leant back against the hard library chair, and started to devour it.

Professor Przevosniak (he hadn't known his name then, of course) had smiled, slightly, and passed on into the further reaches of the library.

It was three more weeks before he even saw him again.That time Dex had been considering a problem in applied mechanics. In the neighbourhood he had become known over the years as the miracle kid who could fix anything, a reputation that his father alternatively took an intense, vicarious pride in or which provoked an equally intense resentment at the presumption of those who requested help. And it was purely a matter of chance which way his father would jump on any given occasion. And, whichever way, it was almost certain to leave Dex in torments of toe-curling embarrassment. But it was infinitely worse if the request was ill-timed; say if his father had spent too long that day "discussing politics" with his neighbour Mr Petersen, or had otherwise decided that the world valued him at less than his deserving. 

So Dex had taken, where possible, to intercepting such requests before his father got to hear of them and dealing with them - if within his power - in such a way as to ensure he never did. And that meant spending time doing his sketches and preliminary work in the library, at least until the perpetually disapproving librarians found some reason or other to tell him to stop.

"You permit?"

He looked up. The little old man (Dex, fifteen years older than his fourteen-year old self and feeling a century apart, permitted himself a wry smile. How old had Professor Prevosniak really been then? 50? So old, even?) with the grey intent eyes under the thick brows looked at the designs.

"And these are intended for? Precisely, please?"

Before he could speak, Dex suddenly was aware of a grey-bunned, faintly mustachioed Presence above his head. The Chief Librarian. His heart had stilled. And then Professor Przevosniak had looked up at her; cocking his head and smiling slightly, but with infinite authority. And she had, with a murmured apology, backed away a step. And Dex had, abruptly, realised that for Professor Prezevosniak the librarians - whom he had always previously thought of as angels with flaming swords who had the power to exclude him forever from Paradise - were on the whole rather clumsy people, doing a good job in difficult circumstances, no doubt, but for the rest of the time flapping around where they weren't precisely wanted.

Catching Dex's eye, the Professor indicated that they should remove themselves to the lobby. Once there he had flickered a disconcertingly mischievous smile at Dex.

"Ach! They are, you understand, all the same. From Crackov to Warsaw, from Danzig to Vienna. Across the breadth of Europe I have fought off those - ahem - Valkyries who see it as their life's duty to throw themselves between the thinker and the text." His face became suddenly serious. "Show me, please? The drawings I have seen you working on for so long? What are they? And where is the problem?"

He drew a long forefinger across them. "Good. Yes. Good. Very Good. You have seen - yes - the proportions of things. So good, and yet so young. Indeed. But here - here you could save weight. And save steps. Here. And no; this would not fail to safety as you imagine. Were you to weld the strut to this position, however - then -"  
A few strokes of a broad pencil turned the design round. He looked at Dex. And handed the paper back to him.

"Go," Professor Przevosniak said. "Build a prototype to that design. And trust me."

Dex had nodded; done what the old man said.

After that, he and Professor Przevosniak were friends and allies. Sometimes he didn't see the Professor for weeks; sometimes he was in the library days on end. Nor did he always have time to talk. But the sight of him poring over mathematical texts, and persuading the librarians to order ever more obscure tomes for his benefit, was itself a breath of air for Dex in the sometimes stifling narrowness of the neighbourhood. 

_There are other people in the world who find mathematics an intricate and exhilarating dance, rather than a bewildering morass, or a pointless irrelevance._

Gradually, as winter wore through to spring, and some of the bolder kids in the neighbourhood started to rootle through cupboards to fetch gloves, bats and balls out into daylight after their long hibernation, Professor Prevosniak started to set him ferociously complex proofs and theorems to work through, and tear apart his answers with a white-hot, glowing enthusiasm which steeled Dex's determination that next time, next time....

Until the day he'd carelessly allowed his father to catch him with one of the Professor's borrowed books.

He hadn't - to be fair - expected his father home so soon; it was one of his political days and he had expected him and Mr Petersen to be congratulating themselves on spotting President Coolidge's understated genius for some hours yet. And there was something about the set of Mr Dearborn's shoulders as he entered the kitchen that made Dex's heart sink; something that set off alarm bells which warned him that, in the perpetually rolling motion picture that Dex, however hard he tried otherwise, believed made up his father's perception of the world, the caption "Devoted husband and unparalleled father" had just come round again.

It was an affliction that happened every three months or so, though fortunately there were four Dearborn kids - counting only the ones still living and at home - to spread it across.  
But it was just bad luck that Dex caught the full force of it alone and unprepared. And doubly bad luck he had the evidence in his hands, and was too careless to hide it.

"What's that, what's that you've got there?" 

Mr Dearborn pushed out his chest and stretched out a pudgy white hand, demanding he hand over the book. Dex, hesitating only momentarily (what else could he do, after all?), passed it over, chewing his lower lip in sheer nervousness, as his father narrowed his little eyes, looked it suspiciously up and down, frowned uncomprehendingly (as if, Dex thought with a manic despairing hilarity, he was about to say that it was all Greek to him, which, since it happened to be a commentary on Euclid, would be ironically appropriate in the circumstances).

His father flicked the pages back and forth, looking increasingly baffled. Dex stifled the urge to laugh, though, to say truth, it was no laughing matter and deep down he knew it. His father drew a deep breath, as though to say no damned book was going to get the better of him, huh! and then - bewilderingly - Dex saw his attention caught - his father's eyes fixed on the flyleaf; looking down at the fine copper-plate inscription on the black-lettered book-plate neatly pasted inside the front cover, and became suddenly the victim of cold dread as his father swelled up like a turkey-cock, his skin changed to an unattractive shade of puce, and his voice assumed that note which Dex, shrinking inwardly, had always associated with the buckle end of a belt.

"Who gave you this?"

Dex stammered something; it appeared, at least, that the words "Professor Prezvosniak" and "library" were intelligible. His father threw the book down on the counter in a passion.  
"Prezzvonozzyak? That the grey haired guy? Teaches night-school, or some such?"

Dex nodded dumbly. His father snorted.

"Mr Petersen was telling me something about that - that - him - only the other day. Saying that we - the residents - ought at least to be able to do something about that sort of person coming here, bringing down our neighbourhood. Even if we hadn't been able to stop the other scum....Oh, wait till he hears this! Said there ought to be something we could do to stop it, did he? Well, between us we'll be damned if we don't make sure there is. Wait here."

His father snatched up his coat and hat, which he'd put on the peg behind the door as he entered, and left. A second later, however, the door burst open a foot or so. His father's head poked round through the gap.

"And don't you be touching that - that thing while I'm away, either. Go to your room!"

Inexplicably, he wagged a white forefinger at the book before vanishing and slamming the door behind him.

Dex, his heart pounding, grabbed the string bag his mother kept for grocery and raced upstairs, into the room over which he and his big brother nightly disputed territorial rights.   
Whatever had gone wrong, had gone badly wrong, and he needed to sort things first, and ask questions later. He rifled frantically through the collection of orange crates that made up his bookshelves. He snatched up every one of the books Professor Prezevosniak had lent him, scribbled a brief, bewildered, apologetic note in pencil, tucked it into the front cover of the first of them, thrust them into the bag and turned, irresolutely, clutching them to his chest. His mother - yes, he could hear her coming in below - and yes, she would do the right thing if he asked her. Unquestionably. But if Father found out - well, it wasn't as if he reserved his belt-buckle for his sons -

Seeking alternatives, he turned towards the window. And whistled in sheer relief. Down below on the sidewalk little Sukey Michaels was stumping leisurely along. 

He let off a raucous two-fingered whistle. She looked all around; first, he guessed, for the other girl - the one who'd obviously prompted the salute - and then, baffled, for the perpetrator. Catching her eye, at last, he beckoned her closer.

"Sukey! Please? I'm stuck up here. Dad's - um - mad at me." He shrugged, helplessly. "Look, I'm stuck. Here. And he's awful mad. Can you take these books round to Professor Prezvosniak's, please? He lodges over that draper's store on Main."

He fumbled desperately in his pocket. "I'll give you a nickel." It was all he had until Saturday, but he knew what that look in his father's eye meant, and the books had been lent, not given, and were not his to see ripped up before his eyes -

Sukey drew herself up, proudly, looking for a moment as though she were an Empress, and as if an entire court kow-towed around her.   
"Thank you, Dex. But I don't want a nickel. Of course I'll take him his books if you want me to. So. There. It - it would be my privilege to oblige. Mister Dearborn."

After that, Dex had sat on the edge of his bed, bewildered and terrified, for some time. 

There were voices outside the window; his father's familiar aggrieved sound and Professor Prezevosniak's heavy accent, raised for once in a storm of protest.

Despite his father's injunction, Dex bolted out of his bedroom and into the cupboard under the stairs. It was, of course, an adjunct of the kitchen (where his mother was labouring and might at a pinch be prevailed on to lie for him). His mother saw him scurry in. She raised her eyebrows, but made her face otherwise immobile. There was a crack next to the newel post. It was the one he had worked over the year to widen, unobtrusively. With one's eye to the right point one could see anything. For, if he didn't rate you, Mr Dearborn would hardly invite you into even the stiff parlour, let alone the relaxed living room. But he wouldn't conduct a row like this one wholly on the doorstep, if Dex was any judge, either. The hall would be the place. And from underneath the stairs one could hear everything. And in a few seconds he was proved right.

"Petersen recognised your name. And after a bit of digging we turned up the newspaper piece, too. Here. Recognise it?"

Professor Prevosniak's voice had never sounded so arrogantly Old Europe, Dex thought. "Of course. It is scarcely the kind of experience one could forget. As you would appreciate. But. Were you to read it closely - if you have read it closely - you will have seen that I was acquitted of that shameful charge. No?"

Very deliberately, Professor Przevosniak added, "When I was on Ellis Island, they would send people to tell us, you understand, of the benefits we would enjoy should we be allowed to land on the soil of the United States. And they reminded us, constantly, that in contrast to the position which applied in the lands we had left, that we had at last reached a country where "a man is innocent until he is proved guilty". Was that not so, then?"

There was a pause. Dex's father gave vent to a torrent of incomprehensible ranting. Professor Przevosniak, Dex guessed, had planned to hear it out to the very end. And then he caught his own name swept up in the obloquy. And Professor Przevosniak caught it too, evidently. And his pose shattered.

"What? But you cannot possibly imagine -"

His father's voice had all the intense smugness that Dex had learnt to detest over the years. "And why else would I suppose you would be hanging round my son, eh?"  
There was a gulping sound; putting his eye to the crack next to the newel post Dex caught a view of Professor Przveosniak's face collapsed in shock. His thick accents tried to wrap themselves round the incomprehensible.

"But - but still - you cannot possibly imagine - I may have been indiscreet, and foolish, perhaps - but you suspect - I might have feelings - might have expressed feelings - towards someone whom I regarded as a student? Never! Never! For you to think such a thing - yes - it touches my honour - back in the old days - back when I was the man I was I would have asked you to answer for that - yes, at the end of three feet of tempered steel! I have been out on the field touching matters of honour - yes - and I would again - "

He spluttered to a stop. He took two laboured breaths, and added, "Mr Dearborn. If it is your request, I will not speak to your son again. You have your concerns, and - while I believe you to be wrong, nonetheless I respect those concerns. But you must know that - in my considered professional judgment - your son is one of those geniuses that, as a professor, one dreams to find once in a generation. There are scholarships - there are bursaries. There are ways and means. In the name of the Holy Virgin, tell me you will not prevent his proceeding to college, should he prove - as I assume he will - good enough?"

Dex felt his heart almost stop. College? An ambition as ridiculous as flying to the moon, and yet one he'd dreamt of since he'd first heard what college was. And imagine Professor Przevosniak thinking of it independently -

Dex's father snorted. "College? Are you mad? That's not something that people like us have anything to do with. And a good thing, if there are people like you teaching it. And they can't somehow seem to see how wrong that is."

There was a final outburst of spluttering from Professor Przevosniak. And then, it seemed, an admittance of defeat, and his departure. Dex dodged out into the kitchen just as his father retreated from the hall.

"I thought," his father said in an awful voice, "I told you to stick to your room."

"Being in trouble doesn't let you off doing the washing up," his mother interjected, before Dex could say anything. He dared not send her a glimpse of thanks. She continued. "He'd got his chores to do. I knew you'd sent him to his room, but I thought you meant not before he'd done them. And there's the potatoes still to peel. Also."

There was a pause. And then his father said, "Yes. Well. That's right. Do what your mother says, and go to your room afterwards." And turned on his heel to leave the kitchen.

He was sitting on the step of the backdoor, peeling potatoes and dropping them into the galvanised bucket beside him, when he felt the faintest breath on the back of his neck. He looked up. His mother had her hands in the pockets of her flowered calico apron.

"I'm sorry," she said abruptly. And turned and gone indoors.

That was, he recalled muzzily later, the only time he'd actually cried since he'd stopped being really, really small. Of course, weeks later, when he'd been told of Professor Przevosniak's death (apparently something untraceable had gone wrong with the gas mantle in his lodging) he'd felt pretty bad. But he'd held on, and not blubbed, just as a proper boy should. Even when his father had come in, his face all alive with glee, and told him "We got him in the end, son." And he'd asked dumbly why it was necessary, and his father had, incomprehensibly, muttered something like "You're not old enough to know about that. And let's hope you never will be.".

Perhaps, even, if he was given long enough after Joe woke up he would explain about Professor Przevosniak. Perhaps. But come what may he would tell him about the photographs, and stand Joe's disgust. With Professor Przevosniaak's stiff-necked independence. With the same dignity.

That settled in his head, at length he slept.


	7. Dex determines to come clean about the photographs, only to find Joe has a surprise for him

When he woke again, Joe was up and moving around, probably trying to find coffee. Dex, somewhat bleakly, wished him luck; so far on this side of the Atlantic he hadn't met anyone that didn't think coffee came as concentrate from a little bottle with a picture of a subservient native bearer on the label. Anyway, Joe gave up after a bit, lit the fire, boiled the kettle and made tea. 

They were drinking it when Joe said, abruptly, "We found the traitor, in the end. It was Grogan. He's dead."

Dex's mind whirled. "Did - I mean, did you - ?"

Joe shook his head. "No. His paymasters, presumably. Or someone else from his past. We weren't the first people he'd betrayed. Not even the third, most probably."

His face was at once shuttered and vulnerable; his mouth was set in hard lines but his eyes could not conceal how deeply the hurt had gone. Dex cursed himself for having to drop this next blow, but things had gone on too long already. The quicker he used the knife, the shorter the pain would last. 

"Joe - there's something I have to -"

Joe interrupted. "Yes. I know. It's ok. I managed to get them back. Here."

From the inside of his flying jacket Joe flipped out an envelope and tossed it to him. He opened it with fingers that shook a little, and not just with the chill which, even with the fire lit, pervaded the bothy. Dex's stomach turned over. He stared down at the four prints and the thin strip of negative which had fallen onto the bedcover. Joe, who seemed to be avoiding his eye, caught up the poker and stirred the peat fire into a blaze. He gestured towards the photographs, and then towards the flames.

"Do you want to do the honours, or shall I?"

Dex, momentarily, knew he looked fierce. Without attempting to comment, he looked up at Joe; blazing in his defence of his nature; his choices. Dex's voice sounded harsh in his own ears as he said, "Do what you think you should."

The thin celluloid of the negatives curled in upon itself at the first touch of the flames, like a slug sprinkled with salt. The prints took longer to catch, browning first and then flaring to light, and thereafter to extinction. The last Dex saw of them was his own eyes, looking desperately at him out of the fire as though trying to convey some message or other.

Joe's voice was hesitant."Look - I - I'm sorry - but I need to know. That guy. In the photographs. Who -?"

Dex's stomach clenched. "I don't know." 

"That's right? I mean - look Dex, I'm not trying to pry, but it -" Joe's voice still sounded uncertain - which was all wrong, of course: Joe was never uncertain, not about anything.  
His simmering shame and anger broke through to the surface. "Look - it was just some guy. I never saw him before. I hope never to see him again. OK? Drop it. Just - drop it."

Joe's face was a mess of embarrassment - belatedly, it occurred to him that those particular questions could hardly have been easier to ask than to answer - and, improbably, relief.

"Thank god," Joe said in an uncharacteristically subdued tone. He must have looked his surprise, because Joe went on, "I meant - if it had been someone - you know - that you - cared for, Christ knows I didn't want to be the one to do that to you; to give you that sort of news. That he'd - betrayed you. That he'd been part of the set-up. From the very beginning, probably."

He was obviously still not getting it. Joe gestured awkwardly. "I mean - look Dex, what I mean is that - from what you can actually see in the - um - photographs themselves, and what must have happened for them to get taken at all, he must have known they were being taken. Otherwise - anyone looking at the photographs would have been able to identify something about him."

A whirl of realisation swept over him. 

_Of course._

There was a mordant flickering of black humour. _Not even lusted after for yourself._

And then knowledge rushed in upon him, and fugitive memories; the number of times he'd seen Joe poring over grainy prints taken from reconnaissance planes, straining eyes and ingenuity to make them give up any clues which might be there for the having, and help him on some daring raid. Only, this time, the photographs sitting on Joe's blotter must have been of -

Dex started shivering uncontrollably. Joe crossed the bothy, sat on the edge of the bed, took off his flying jacket and wrapped it round Dex's shoulders. It didn't help; Dex continued to shake from head to toe. Realising it was shock and not cold he was dealing with here, Joe wrapped an arm round Dex's shoulders and hugged him. It was a gesture Dex had seen him make dozens of times; to wounded men, dying men, men who'd seen their colleagues torn into bloody ribbons in front of them. He'd never realised how good it would feel; the steady warmth and pressure, the silent confidence, the sense of belonging, of being held into something bigger than you were, something that would hold you up when your own strength failed.

He didn't belong, though. Not any more. Not after what he'd put Joe through. Not after what he'd put the Legion through.

"I'm resigning," he said abruptly. 

Joe's arm tightened around him. "What?" 

Joe was so close that his breath as he spoke stirred Dex's hair. Despite everything, he felt his newly convalescent body responding to Joe's proximity, and cursed under his breath. He shut his eyes, and said, through gritted teeth, "I'm resigning from the Legion."

"No you aren't," Joe said firmly. "And that's an order, Dex."

Despite himself, Dex found himself emitting a small, hopeless giggle. "Joe; that's the one order you can't give."

Joe's voice sounded somehow lost and remote. "You're my right hand, Dex. You can't expect me to cut off my right hand. Not without fighting like hell, anyway."

He tried to say something; the lump in his throat rose up and stopped him. Joe sounded as though it was an effort to sound calm and practical, too. "Get it into perspective, Dex. I - I've been thinking about this. A lot. Recently. Look: I wouldn't bet there's a man in the Legion who hasn't risked or done something incredibly stupid if he thought there was a chance of getting laid at the end of it. Including me. Actually, especially me. God, Dex; you know me. You know that's true."

There was a pause.

"It's not the same," Dex said eventually. 

Joe was obviously thinking about that one. Honesty warred with generosity in his expression. Eventually he said, hesitantly, "No. It isn't. But perhaps - just perhaps - it should be." He got up from the bed. "Actually, I know what your problem is. When was the last time you had a solid meal inside you?"

The sheer banality of the question shook Dex's thoughts out of their gloomy downwards spiral. "Three - four days?" he hazarded. "I mean, I've had beef-tea, and soup and arrowroot - I think - "

Wavering memories of a long parade of tepid liquids - all lovingly presented, all coming with assurances of being the very thing to do him good, all lacking seasoning and any hint of discernable flavour; some greasy, some grainy, some just bland and bewildering - came back to his palate. He shuddered.

"Right," Joe said decisively. "Get your head down and get some more sleep. I'm going down to the village on the motorbike to forage for some proper food. Oh, and since we've fetched up somewhere with less asinine laws than home, it'd be positively rude not to buy some of the wine of the country. You could use a drink, too."

He gaped, momentarily. "But they don't make wine in Scotland."

Joe's mobile face came alive with mischief, and mock-puzzlement. "They don't? Oh well, guess I'll just have to make do with whatever they've got." He ran his hand ruefully over his chin. "And I should see if they can run to a safety razor, too. And some soap. And a toothbrush. I had to leave Glasgow in a bit of a hurry. See you later. And don't try to get up before I get back. And that is an order."

He was gone. Dex curled weakly back among the bedclothes. He realised he was still wearing Joe's jacket, the warm fleece lining imprinted with his memory, with the shape of his body. He ought, of course, to take it off. He oughtn't to enjoy the feel of it like a caress about his body, like the promise of hope coming out of the blackness of nightmare. He ought - he ought -

Still wearing the jacket, Dex fell asleep.


	8. An unexpected visitor arrives at the bothy

Improbably, Joe's prescription worked; the effects of a wash and a shave, and the promise of solid food made by the appetising smells filling the bothy from the Primus stove over which Joe had been engaged for the last few minutes were surprisingly effective in restoring Dex's sense of balance. Dressed, but still shaky, he had exchanged his camp bed for the battered leather chesterfield in front of the fire (and how had McAllister managed to get that bulky piece of furniture up the rough track from the hamlet at the bottom?) and been strictly forbidden by Joe to exert himself any further until he'd had something to eat.

Joe had been amusing him with a light, rapid-fire flow of Legion gossip; nothing too demanding and nothing which required a response more demanding than "Uh?" or "You don't say?" when a firm knocking sounded on the door. Joe turned, looking questioningly at Dex. 

Dex shrugged. "It could be the housekeeper from the manse. She's been coming up once or twice a day to keep an eye on me."

Joe made up his mind. "Well, whoever it is, there'll be smoke coming from the chimney. We can't pretend not to be here. And, like you say, it's almost bound just to be someone delivering milk or something." 

But Dex noted he slid his gun, which had been resting on the table, into his trousers pocket before unlatching the heavy door. And only someone who knew Joe as well as he did would have detected the wariness which underlay his pose of assumed nonchalance as he took in and recognised the figure standing in the doorway.

Dex made a quick reassuring gesture, one which he hoped only Joe would picked up, but from McAllister's expression he somehow doubted that. And he had caught McAllister's quick, appraising estimate, and guessed he knew Joe was armed, too.

Joe had caught Dex's signal too; his posture changed, and his face relaxed into a welcoming smile. In turn, McAllister's wariness dissipated.

"You're a very perseestant man, Mr Sullivan," McAllister said. 

Joe shrugged, stepped back into the room, and resumed turning over the rashers of bacon in the frying pan on the stove. McAllister closed the door tidily behind him, looked from him to Dex, and back again, and his wintry expression relaxed into a smile. "Though I'm relieved to find you're evidently not the blackguard I took you for at first. It was a matter of no small concern to me when Hamish McDonald phoned to alert me from Tarbert that you'd followed the _Annie Laurie_ so far, ye ken."

Joe looked up. "But that could only have been yesterday evening! How did you manage to get here in the time?"

The old foundry-master shrugged. "Oh, the trams start running out to Gourock early. And then the ferries are fine and convenient. And once you get to Dunoon, it's nothing but a wee bitty step across country, if you're used to it." He looked ruefully down at his feet. "Though I regret that I'm no such a good hand on the hills as I used to be."

Joe raised an eyebrow. "It's a good ten miles from here to Dunoon. Rough country, too. If you like, I'll give you a lift back on the motorbike when you have to go."

McAllister pursed his lips. "Would that be the unco contraption I saw propped up by the front door? Man, if you came over the Rest and Be Thankful on that in the weather we were having yesterday then all I can say is you must have as many lives as a brace of cats, and no decent respect for your own neck."

Helplessly tickled by the aptness of the summary, Dex uttered a quick, sharply stifled bark of laughter. Joe, his face alight with amusement, shot a glance back at him, before turning back to McAllister.

"I confess, it's something that has been said about me before," he said. "But it was the day before yesterday, actually. I've chased the _Annie Laurie_ from Campbelltown to Lochgoilhead, and from Ardrishaig to Holy Loch. By way of Strachur and Tignabruiach, At about 11am yesterday an adenoidal brat in Inverary told me that he "didna' doot but she was away to Broderick Bay the afternoon." At which I nearly killed the child."

His eyes still dancing - it warmed Dex's heart to see it - Joe turned to McAllister. "It seems you have more pull in this neighbourhood than a Neapolitan heavy would have in Mulberry Street, NYC." He saluted. "I respect you. Sir." He grinned at him with lazy assurance.

The old engineer grinned back at him with equal assurance. "I'll be grateful if ye would pass on your views to Davey McPherson. Ye ken; I've always held by the opinion that if ye treat a man as a man - oh, granted, ye'll have your disappointments, but there's human nature for you - but ultimately that's the way ye'll be rewarded. In your own soul, if no-where else. Though I didna' doot, the West Highland way of soaking the Saxon might not have played its part, in all justice."

His eye fell on Dex, sitting on the bed, leaning back against the wall cupping his coffee. He turned from him to Joe; his eyes needle-bright, his side-whiskers bristling. "Doubtless this means you'll be minded to deprive me of the best foreman I ever had, imph?"

Dex hadn't thought of that - he gulped - but Joe was making a small gesture with his hand towards him - leave it to him - and then he turned to McAllister. His face, for once, was utterly without any attempt to charm, bluff, befuddle or bemuse.

"I need him. I admit that. I've - " His voice dropped into a register Dex had never heard from him before. "I've suffered losses where I'd not have expected them, and people have - let me down - and I do desperately need Dex's help if we're ever going to sort things out. And I don't know yet what's going on, but I do know it has the smell of something big. Big and nasty. It is your decision, but - look - I'm not spinning a line when I say it could affect the fate of nations."

Joe coughed, and turned fully towards McAllister. "It's in your hands, McAllister. I'm not owed anything. In fact - I know I've behaved pretty shabbily, and that - well, things wouldn't have got out of hand if I'd been doing what I should have done. So. I can't order. I can't demand. I can only ask. And I am asking. Whatever I get is whatever you both choose to give me."

He stood up. He paced across the lime washed bothy like the tiger which restlessly patrols his thirty-foot cage, and turned to face McAllister's forthright eyes. And realised that he indeed had a fight on his hands. 

Joe gulped. "It's your choice. But I know your business. Our business. And I know what an engineer like Dex is worth."

McAllister looked fiercely at him. "Do ye? Do ye truly?"

Joe turned to Dex. His face was desperately urgent. "Dex-? Dex-? Have you ever realised that what you and your team do is what underwrites everything I ever do in the air? There's not a move I make - there's not a stress I put on the smallest nut of the lousiest kite I ever put into the air that isn't your gift, and that of your team. Have - have you ever read Kipling's poems?"

He was shaking his head automatically - for what time had he ever had to read poetry? Realising, Joe put his head on one side. His eyes went glassy for a moment as he called the lines to mind. His voice was careful: invoking memories of an elementary school child reciting with practised periods and pauses, and half an eye on the watching schoolmarm and her waiting cane:

" _The sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited that good part;  
But the sons of Martha favour their Mother of the careful soul and the troubled heart.  
And because she lost her temper once, and because she was rude to the Lord her Guest,  
Her sons must wait upon Mary's Sons, world without end, reprieve or rest.  
It is their care in all the ages to take the buffet and cushion the shock.  
It is their care that the gear engages; it is their care that the switches lock.  
It is their care that the wheels run truly -_"

He gulped, and swallowed half the poem, losing it completely. 

The old engineer, glaring fiercely at him, took it up.

" _They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose.  
They do not teach that His Pity allows them to drop their job when they dam' well choose -_"

And so through to the end. When he had finished McAllister looked at Joe. "I'll grant ye know your poetry, Mr Sullivan. But do you know this one, then: " _Oh, Lord, thou hast made the world below the shadow of a dream. And by and large I take it so - excepting always steam -_ " ? No? Pity. I've never read anything which summarises the soul of an engineer better. A pretty poor excuse for a human being, Rudyard Kipling, to my mind, but when he wrote, times were when you could see him reach out and stroke the very cheek of Heaven."

McAllister shot a look at Joe then, and at Dex. Both held their ground.

"Do what you will, laddies. It may have been short, but it's been a privilege working with you - Mikey. But -" he shot a fierce glance at Dex. "You're not over the influenzy yet, laddie; not by a long chalk. So I'll no be expecting you at the workshop on Monday, whatever you decide. Be mindful of that. And don't let him bother you into going back to the workbench before you're recovered fully, either. You won't do much for "the fate of nations" if you can barely stand, ye ken. Understood?"

He nodded, unable, momentarily, to get any words out. In fact, there was a hot prickling behind his eyes which was ridiculous, really; must be an after effect of his illness. He ducked his head, hoping that neither of the others would notice. Thankfully, the conversation continued above his head.

"So," Joe said conversationally to McAllister, "may I help you to bacon and eggs? You've had a long cold trip to get here."

There was a pause. 

"Aye," McAllister said. "I don't mind if I do. And it'll set me up for the journey back. Since I can see he's in safe hands now."

There was the chink of plates and cutlery around him. Dex kept his head down, feeling the warmth and acceptance of friendship around him as a gift he thought he had forever forfeited, and not feeling quite ready, yet, to take the gift that was offered him.


	9. Joe says what he thinks at last

The fire sunk low; the evening wore on. Outside the gathering storm beat against the heavy shutters; inside the firelight and the lamplight were warm, inviting. Heartened by their light Dex started to revive. Until he reached for the whisky bottle the same time Joe did, and brushed Joe's hand.

He started to stammer inconsequential apologies. Then Joe, abruptly, entwined his fingers with his own. The shock knocked him sideways.

"Jeez, Joe, what -?"

"Something I should have done years ago," Joe said clearly, and bent over and kissed him. Not violently; not intrusively. Not as though he took anything at all for granted.

Just -

Just kissed him.

His lips were softer than anything Dex could possibly imagine, and slightly parted.

Dex thought his heart was about to stop.

"Wha-? But Joe - you're not - you don't -"

One immensely strong hand caught his own at the wrist, pulling it inexorably downward to rest on Joe's crotch. Under his captured and shocked fingers Joe's dick was rigidly erect, pressing upwards against the soft fabric of his pants. Dex uttered a small gasp that was practically a whimper. Joe's pupils were dilated; his face looked transcendent in the firelight, like when he'd come back to base after lifting home a plane by his bare hands and sheer force of willpower from some death or glory mission over enemy territory.

"I don't?" he murmured. "I'm not?"

"Joe -"

"Please," Joe murmured. "Please. Please, Dex. Oh God, I want you so much."

His world was changing - being new-made around him by the second. Timidly, gently, guiltily his hand against Joe's pants spread wide and started to stroke. Joe let out a long hissing sigh of satisfaction, and stretched his own hand out in turn.

"Oh - oh Jeez, Captain - oh. Oh. OH."

Joe's fingers were wriggling determinedly past the waistband of Dex's pants. Uncontrollably, he thrust up to meet them. His naked flesh met Joe's questing finger-tips. A small, fierce sound, almost a growl, came from deep within Joe's throat as they connected. Dex gulped.

" I - oh - gosh - are you trying to say that - uh, you can't possibly mean you - uh - want me - uh - That Way? Cap- ?"

There was a rumble of amusement from the body now pressed close - amazingly, wonderfully close - beside him on the chesterfield. The voice was low, rough, urgent. And warm with a depth of affection which set him ablaze. "Get a grip, Dex. I didn't think I was making myself obscure. But if I was, then I'm sorry."

Soft lips and warm breath pressed against his left ear. "Dex: I want you in every conceivable way. And I want you now."

This time the kiss was a ferocious capture of his lips, and Dex found within himself an almost equal ferocity, as he pulled Joe down upon him and his tongue darted up into Joe's mouth. Joe, wriggling across to straddle him, pinned his thighs between his knees. He thrust up his hips to meet the sweet pressure of Joe's dick against his own. Joe gave a small gasp, and slid his hand between their bodies, rubbing, stroking, caressing; even through the thick fabric of his pants making Dex feel as though he would die from sheer pleasure if it continued another second while simultaneously turning him inside out with longing for more.

It was Joe who broke away first. "Too many clothes. Much too many clothes."

He was tearing his shirt off as he spoke - not bothering to remove the cuff-links and leaving it half-buttoned as he ripped it over his head and tossed it recklessly aside.

But Dex - however much he wanted to seize whatever the next few minutes brought (and he couldn't even imagine living past them, so frantically urgent his body felt, so fast and hard the thundering of his heart) - was still a man cursed with the mind of a born scientist. He had never been unable to ask "why"? Even, some tiny part of his brain acknowledged, when the fantasies of years of sleepless nights were coming true around him, and inquiry at this moment was both insane and counter-productive.

"Joe - please? What? Why - why now? Tell me, please. Talk to me. Please. Why? Why now?"

Joe turned to him; his expression so nakedly open that it struck Dex abruptly as far more intrusive for him to be looking at his face than at his bare torso with its fine dusting of dark-gold hair - and anyway, they'd swum together often enough on hot summer afternoons at the base, and heaven knew he'd cast enough - hopefully - unseen glances on those occasions so that shouldn't be any news to him, whatever else the evening might reveal - but on the other hand somehow Joe's body had just acquired a different quality now he knew he was in some bewildering sense licensed to look at him guilt-free and unashamed. And it wasn't fair, because his arousal was now so intense he couldn't think straight - and given what Joe had suddenly resumed doing with his fingers he was plainly determined to prevent Dex being able to think in coherent sentences any time soon - 

"Joe - oh God - Joe - Jeez - Cap -" was the best he could manage. And then the right phrase - or was it the idiotically wrong one? By now he couldn't tell - managed to escape his lips. "Too much. Too much at once, Joe. Please? Slower?"

"What?" The green eyes widened - the fingers stopped their delicious wandering. "Don't you want -?"

He practically choked - of course he wanted - how could Joe possibly be in any doubt about that -? But - did he not realise - ?

"You could go to jail," he gasped out. It was the first thing that came into his head. 

Joe put his head on one side; looked at him very steadily for a second or so. Then, deadpan, he said, "So you haven't noticed how close I've been to strangling Polly, these last few months? And they'd certainly send me to the chair for _that_. So I'm supposed to think jail is a _problem_ by comparison?"

He raised a questioning, provocative eyebrow. Uncontrollably, Dex giggled. He looked up at Joe, whose face was also alive with laughter. Which wasn't fair; not at a moment like this. Because Dex needed to keep his head, and when Joe looked like that it was so very difficult -

"Joe!" He had tried to put reproof into his tone, and perhaps succeeded. The laughter left Joe's face. He reached out an arm, put it around Dex's shoulders and pulled him down close against his chest.

"Look," he hissed in his ear, "if you were a life insurance business, what premium would you take on my life, then?"

"Wha-?"

The sudden question jolted him back. Every single mission Joe flew, at the back of Dex's mind the black crows rose up and circled, however he tried to drive them back, tried to beat the bad-luck thoughts, however much he checked every nut, every line, every reservoir. However much he told himself that Cap was the best, the best in the business. There had always been one truth at the back of his mind - where he had made sure, for his own sanity, it stayed:  
 _He has to be lucky all the time. The bad guys only need to get lucky once._

But - he cursed himself for his stupidity now - it had never occurred to him that Joe was more than capable of doing the same simple equation.

Joe looked at him, and smiled. But the sadness which hung about his lips tore at Dex's heart.

"Look, Dex. If you don't think this is right, tell me. Tell me if you don't want it - don't want me. Whatever. But don't try to put me off with arguments based on risk. Risk is where I live. Risk is what I breathe. I want you, and you aren't going to put me off just by telling me that it's too risky, that's for sure. Please?"

There was a huge lump, like a stone in his throat. His voice was hoarse; he could barely choke the words out."Why didn't you say so? Before? Before I - ?" The rest of the sentence was lost in an uprush of guilt and fury.

Joe looked at him, his face a stricken mask. "I'm sorry, Dex. For - for being an idiot. For - being a coward."

There must have been some instinctive leaping denial in his expression, because Joe made an abrupt chopping gesture with the edge of one hand.

"No - don't try to pretend I haven't been, Dex. I ought to have been more honest - with myself, for one thing. And I wasn't. And you've been hurt by it. And I'm so sorry. I should have and didn't. Because I was scared." He dropped his voice. "In fact; I'm scared now. Bloody terrified, in fact. And that's not just because - well, not just for the obvious reason."

The earlier tidal waves of passion and urgency had receded a little; they had left a space within which Dex could still listen, and think, and breathe. Joe's hands were no longer stroking him, but clutching tightly at his shoulders as though he was drowning in deep water. His nails were biting deep; Dex would be bruised in the morning. But he'd die rather than interrupt Joe now; personal discomfort was an irrelevance. Joe's eyes were wide, his brow furrowed with need, and concentration. As though he wanted to be absolutely certain that every syllable he uttered was the right one, beyond any possibility of misunderstanding.

As though, Dex thought, with a sudden shock which tingled along every nerve he possessed, this mattered more than anything he'd ever said to anyone before.

"I want you, Dex. But you're not -" He traced a pattern across Dex's back with one forefinger. "You're not the sort of person I could fool around with. You're too - honest for that. With you - it would have to mean something. And meaning something to anyone - that's what's always scared me. More than anything."

The eyes were hooded now; almost troubled. "The others -" 

One circling hand indicated, Dex gathered, Polly and all her ilk. He hoped God would forgive him the small meanness of his fierce upsurge of pleasure at Joe's dismissive tone. 

"They don't want honesty. They don't want to know who I really am. It's the Sky Captain they want. Some golden make-believe who's larger than life, who takes a good photograph, and looks right on their arm - they don't want anything that might spoil the picture. They don't want - anything real. Or messy." Joe's expression looked as though he was tasting something bitter, but he pressed on. "And I'm OK with that. Because it means I don't have to worry about them getting close. It's all smoke and mirrors - shadows on the wall. Just gilt paint over plaster of Paris. And it's fun for me, and they keep their illusions -"

He turned to Dex with his eyes wide open, and Dex's heart turned over. "That's not a stunt I could ever pull with you, Dex, though. You know me. Through and through. You know what a screw-up I am."

Unbidden, Dex's hand strayed up to stroke Joe's dishevelled hair. Joe relaxed his grasp enough to slump across Dex's chest, settling his head against Dex's collar-bone. Dex's arms tightened around him in an effort at comfort.

"No. Never a screw-up."

"No?" Joe's voice sounded remote and bitter: more than ever Dex regretted his inquisitive streak. "Do you remember my nightmares after Nanjing? Suppose I'd told Polly about those. If she'd listened at all, the headline would have been, "Heroes with Feet of Clay". You, I discovered a bit later, had wandered round and quietly added extra soundproofing to my quarters. In case the men heard me screaming."

Dex's face flamed. He looked into the glowing embers of the fire. "We were doing a lot of noisy work down on the shop-floor at the time. You needed your sleep. Extra sound-proofing was routine for anyone with sleeping quarters on the base."

Joe exhaled. "I'm sure. And the tea?"

Dex knew he sounded nervous. "Tea?"

Joe's voice was gentle. "All through the next few months, however early I woke, when I couldn't stand trying to get back to sleep any more, and got up, I would find you doing something incredibly complicated at a workbench. And you'd always tell me that you'd just put the kettle on, and would I like a cup of tea?"

Dex tried and failed to say something. Before realising that the rules had changed, and actually he was no longer barred from speaking the truth. And that Joe's ear was inches from his lips. 

"I wanted to get in with you," he breathed awkwardly. "When I heard you dreaming. I just wanted to get in with you. And hold you. Till dawn broke."

"Oh God." Joe's tone was not, Dex thought, irreverent. "I wish you had. Oh God, Dex, I only wish you had." There was a pause, and then, it seemed, Joe recovered a little of his normal insouciance. "Not that the tea wasn't very welcome too, you understand."

Dex could hear the note of desperation in Joe's voice as he said it. His arms tightened around Joe's body. Nothing had taught him how to deal with this sort of thing. But instinct had to be worth something, surely. His hand went to Joe's fly. He made his voice husky.

"And if I had? What would you have wanted? To take your mind off your dreams?"

Without waiting for an answer, very slowly, with long, lingering and irrelevant strokes, he started to undo the buttons. Joe arched up against his hand. And gasped. And then his own hands stretched out and started frantically tearing at Dex's clothes. His head was thrown back; Dex could trace the long outline of his jaw and throat silhouetted against the firelight.

"You, Dex. You. Without a stitch on. And hard for me. So hard."

The rough passion in his voice lit a dark fire within Dex's body, rippling out from his groin, igniting his whole body with desire, and one single thought, so that he tore at Joe's clothes as Joe in turn tore at his, and at last the whole mess was off and thrown God-knew-where about the bothy, and they were clawing at each other and kissing frantically in a tangled heap of limbs on the hearthrug, and Joe was wrong about what he'd said earlier, because he was golden, every inch of him was golden in the firelight, and it wasn't thin gilding or make-believe either but solid to the core, and real, and true, and his - his own - 

Joe's whisper in his ear was thick, and urgent. "Tell me, Dex. Tell me. How do you want it?"

Speech was out of the question. And in any event, how could he possibly answer a question like that? His body felt as though it was about to explode; as though any second now any decision of that sort would be made for him. He managed a half-strangled whimper which Joe decoded as a need to have him curl his tongue around his nipples, so that pure molten gold down his nerves and straight to his dick. His hips bucked upwards and he moaned uncontrollably. Joe's head moved up a little from his chest, his eyes blazing with a fierce, feral light, his lips curled in a triumphant smile that had so much of a tiger's snarl about it that a vague, faraway part of Dex's brain thought perhaps he should be afraid, except that he couldn't be afraid, not when it was Joe. And he must have answered that look, somehow, because the triumph in Joe's eyes deepened, and his tongue came out and moistened his full lips, and then he turned, moving down his body with a sudden, whiplash fast movement, and Dex felt him take the head of his dick in his mouth, and he sobbed aloud.

"Yes- Oh, yes- "

He was throbbing with need, thrusting frantically into Joe's mouth, his fingers caught in Joe's hair, his whole being narrowed to a single point of driving urgency, caught in the paradox that he wanted this to go on forever, and he knew he would surely die if he didn't come _right now_.

So abruptly that it almost hurt, Joe's lips were gone from his dick.

"Wha-?" His protesting sound of bewilderment and frustration was cut short by Joe's hand over his mouth; he could taste himself on Joe's skin, salty and pungent.

"Ssh. I thought I heard -"

Joe's body was tense against his. And then they both heard it. A small, tinkling crash - perhaps a plant-pot being knocked over? And a rapidly suppressed exclamation of annoyance from outside the bothy window. A wave of shock and shame and deja-vu swept over him. But Joe's arms were still round him, his lips buried close against the nape of his neck. And his hands were stroking in calming patterns down his body.

"Don't worry, Dex. I put those shutters up myself. No-one can have seen anything through them. Don't worry." Joe brushed his neck with the lightest of possible kisses, and then was skinning into pants and his heavy sweater, grabbed almost at random from the mess on the floor, and reaching for his gun. He checked it was loaded, and flicked the safety-catch with his thumb.

"I'll deal with - whoever it is," he said. "I'll try and buy a bit of time. Dex - you try and clear up here a bit. In case I have to bring them in. Whoever it is. OK?"

He was gone. His body aching with longing and his nerves jangling with shock and fear and want, Dex began the herculean task of trying to make the bothy look as though two comrades-in-arms had been engaged in nothing more than a quiet evening's reminiscence by the fireside, with perhaps the odd dram or two to warm them along the way.


	10. An unwelcome intrusion

Inwardly, Joe spat fury. He wouldn't necessarily have chosen to confess this to Father Nolan (even if the good priest hadn't gone to a well-deserved rest two decades or more ago) but if circumstances in the next few minutes allowed him to shoot someone with a clear conscience, then he knew he'd feel the better for it. And no recriminations, either.

So close - so bleeding close -! And for someone to put their oar in then, of all inopportune times. When Dex had been so near, and sweet, and wanting - 

When there was nothing both heart and dick had desired more than - what he had had within his grasp a scant thirty seconds ago.

More, and much more than he could possibly have dreamt of or deserved. Not in the wildest fantasies he might have entertained over the last few years, in which he had always assumed Dex off-limits. So far off-limits, indeed, with his comic books and gum, and naiveté that it had actually never occurred to him to think of him as a piece in play at all, in that sense. (Briefly, Joe paused to wonder how far that was a conscious poise to avoid trouble, and how far it was instinct; Dex, he now realised, was infinitely smarter than he had ever chosen to acknowledge) 

Until the events of the last few weeks, of course. Back at the base, once the initial storm of disbelief at Davies' revelations had subsided, Joe had been startled (and, to tell truth, more than a little horrified) to find that once his scattered thoughts had had a chance to settle that they had crystallised into a sentiment that sounded remarkably like;  
"And if Dex had to go off and have meaningless strings-free sex with someone he didn't care about, why couldn't he have meaningless strings-free sex with me, dammit?"

Which was not, all things considered, a thought he wanted to confide to Franky. And he supposed her pet physician came to the same thing. 

Then Joe had let himself explore little deeper, and started to examine why he had jumped to the conclusion that he - the other man - the shadow in the photographs - had been someone who meant nothing to Dex beyond a little short-term relief, and was someone whom he could have no possible long-term connection with. The answer which he eventually dredged up to that one - "Because you couldn't bear that someone else to be someone who actually mattered to him" - had been good for another couple of sleepless nights, at least.

Oh God. He wanted Dex: his whole body was aching for his touch. And some idiot had chosen to interrupt, when he was on the brink of getting everything he'd ever wanted. And if he could find an excuse to kill whoever it was now, well, the bastard deserved it.

He kicked the bothy door open a fraction, and slid through it and out into the weeping dark. The noise had come from the back of the bothy, so logically that meant -

He dodged round the corner, straight into the blaze of a flashlight aimed straight and deliberately into his eyes. Despite the fact that, dazzled as he was, he had scarcely a hope in hell of getting a shot off that counted for anything, he barked out "Hands up," and aimed his gun two-handed towards the centre of the glare.

"Well," a wholly familiar voice drawled, "that's no sort of welcome for a girl, Joe. Especially not when I've come thousands of miles to find you. And you don't seem a bit pleased to see me."

Joe exhaled. "Polly."

He flicked the safety-catch on, and holstered the gun. "You blithering imbecile. I nearly shot you. And what the hell are you doing here, anyway?"

She, in turn, lowered the flashlight; in its glow Joe caught a glimpse of golden hair under an incongruous and streaming black sou-wester.

"Looking for you, of course. Not that you've been all that difficult to find."

Her voice had the purr of a cat that had got into the cream. Joe gritted his teeth. She waved the hand holding the flashlight. "Once one of my contacts told me which aerodrome you'd left your plane, that is. It didn't take me long to find the guy you'd borrowed the motor-cycle from. And he was able to tell me what maps he'd lent you, too. Which narrowed things down nicely, as well. And then - you don't seem to have been any too discreet in those quaint little villages you passed through -"

"I was in a hurry."

She shrugged. "Whatever. Terribly helpful, the local people, anyway. And frightfully sympathetic." Her voice acquired a faintly malicious tinge. "I think, you know, that they thought I was a distraught wife in search of an absconding husband."

"Well, I can certainly see why they might leap to the conclusion that any husband you had would take care to get far, far away," Joe said. 

Polly's voice had a faint, hurt edge; that had got through, evidently. "Oh, Joe! You aren't still sore about that last time in New York?"

He raised an eyebrow, irrespective of whether she could see the gesture in the dim light or not. "Sore? Me? Of course not. What's a completely uncalled-for split lip between friends, after all? However, I do recollect that for your own no-doubt perfectly valid reasons with which, I'd like to make it clear, I have no quarrel whatsoever your last words to me did rather emphasise that if you ever saw me again in this lifetime it'd be too soon."

He dropped his voice for emphasis. "That being so, Polly, why the hell have you been chasing me halfway round Scotland?"

She was, blast her, wholly unfazed by his ferocity."Because I've got some information about what's been going on that I need to share with you. Pool our resources. Deal, Joe? Like old times?"

He shut his eyes, and counted to ten. Very slowly. While simultaneously repressing a deeply self-destructive urge to tell her, in the crudest of the terms he had learned from the Shanghai waterfront and elsewhere, of how he, personally, remembered "old times". And about how the events of the last hour or so had in any event put an impenetrable barrier even between her sanitised, edited-for-public-consumption, rose-tinted view of their past together and anything that could possibly amount to a future.

Instead, he coughed, and said, "I could use good intelligence, that's true. And I suppose - like always - you could use an exclusive. So; yes, there's the potential for a deal. But - Polly? Get this straight. Don't go cherishing any daydreams. This is strictly business. OK?"

Her voice was honeyed, almost caressing. "Yes Joe. Understood."

In the glow of the flashlight, and with the benefit of his own excellent night vision he could see her assenting nod. But he could also see her half-closed, indifferent eyes, and the shallow lines about her mouth, and realised that whatever he might have said would never really register at all. She was too wrapped up in her own eternal moving picture, in which she was, for ever and always, the star.

_There never was a man I couldn't get, once I set my mind to it.  
I will go back to Tara. After all, tomorrow is another day. _

He swallowed further commentary as futile.

She looked up at him; the rim of her absurd hat dripping rain into her eyes.

"Anyway, Joe," she said, "do we have to keep discussing it out here? Now we're agreed?"

He drew a deep breath. " "I suppose you' better come inside. The weather isn't getting any better."

She looked gratefully up at him and put her head on one side. "Joe - is Dex with you?"

He gulped. But there was no point in prevaricating. "Yes. Why do you ask?"

She brought her hands together in a gesture that was, he supposed, intended to be disarmingly winsome. "Because I owe him an apology."

 _And you have absolutely no idea of just how true that is at this precise moment,_ Joe thought, unstoppably.

He gulped. "Well," he said, "then perhaps you'd better deliver it in person."

Together they walked round to the front of the bothy. He pushed the door open and waited, gentlemanlike, for her to precede him into the building, while crossing both sets of fingers and some toes that Dex had managed to use the intervening few minutes to the best possible advantage.


	11. An even less welcome revelation. Various rich and famous men - most with aeronautical connections - are implicated in a sinister international conspiracy

Dex cast a last frantic glance around the room as the bothy door opened. He had caught Joe's initial exclamation - "Polly!" - it had been just outside the window, after all, and also he'd guessed Joe had been pitching his voice to be audible. Probably in the next county. So he'd known she would - in all probability - be invited in rather than shot, and sooner rather than otherwise. And had been scurrying manically around snatching up and concealing discarded garments ever since.

Then, as the door to the bothy started to swing open, with a heart-thumping shock he realised exactly what he'd overlooked. 

Joe's underpants; white and incriminating in the centre of the hearthrug. Where he could remember- all too vividly - having tossed them himself. Less than thirty minutes ago.

Just as Polly came forward into the bothy he back-heeled them with a despairing flick into the coal-scuttle, and turned to face her. "Jeez, Polly. This sure is unexpected."

"Hi, Dex." She smiled at him. She dropped her sopping oilskin and sou-wester to the floor where she stood, obviously assuming that there would be minions to pick them up after her. "Any chance of a cup of coffee?"

Joe leaned over, a hard smile on his lips that did not reach his eyes."Sorry, Polly. You're in Britain now. I expect we could manage tea?"

"Or whisky," Dex suggested, keeping his body uneasily between the line of Polly's gaze and the coal-scuttle. She pursed her lips; evidently in her world view Nice Girls should not be invited to consume hard liquor, even if they had had a long journey (and how had she got here, anyway?) through the kind of weather conditions which made Dex appreciate why the locals had decided to christen the stuff "water of life" in the first place.

"Just tea, please, Dex. It'll warm me up. And I'll make up the fire, shall I? Then we'll be all nice and cosy." She dropped to her knees on the hearth-rug, reaching for poker and tongs. 

Dex snatched up the coal-scuttle before she could turn her attentions in that direction. "Uh - then we'll need to get more peats from the shed - we're nearly out. Joe -" 

He gestured frantically with the coal-scuttle in Joe's direction. Joe, infuriatingly, didn't seem to be cottoning on.

"More peats? But I filled it up only -"

To forestall him, Dex thrust the coal-scuttle bodily into his arms. He glanced down, and a most peculiar expression suffused his features. If things hadn't been so desperate, Dex would have suspected him of throttling back a crippling attack of the giggles.

"Ah." Joe said in a rather choked voice. "We must have been getting through fuel faster than I thought. Mind you, it is rather draughty in here, isn't it? Even wearing all the thickest sweaters we've got. Dex, put the kettle on the Primus for Polly, and brew up, there's a good boy, while I go and top up the scuttle."

By the time Joe returned, with a coal-scuttle brimming with peats and absent any trace of underwear, the kettle was singing merrily, and Polly (retreating modestly behind the back of the chesterfield to perform the operation) had removed her shoes and stockings, and put them to dry in front of the fire.

"Anyway, Polly," Joe said, having evidently had time to do some thinking out in the shed, "how did you actually find us? Because you were obviously editing a bit, earlier."

She shrugged. "There are men in the Legion who're happy enough to do me the odd favour. If I ask them nicely. I got the flight plan you'd filed out of them."

Dex was abruptly conscious of Joe, beside him, suddenly going rigid with silent fury. Grogan's treachery had cut deep, Dex guessed - it had gone deep enough with him, and for Joe these things had an even more personal edge; he felt every loss in the Legion as though it were family, and Polly's casual chatter of confidences invited and betrayed must sting like vinegar on an open wound, even if she didn't realise it. 

"Did you? How interesting," Joe breathed with an intonation so venomous to one who knew him that Dex quailed, and almost expected Polly to shrivel where she stood.

She smiled, acknowledging his acceptance of her point, and continued blithely on."Well, naturally once I knew where you'd made landfall in England deducing whom you might have been seeing wasn't so difficult. With a bit of elimination. And then when my contacts at the aerodromes picked up your trail in Scotland again; well, drawing a line between the two became -"

She paused, and favoured them both with a glittering smile.

"Elementary, my dear Watson." Her laugh was high and silvery. "Especially once I got into - what's his name? - McPherson's - office, and got the chance to have a girly heart-to-heart over coffee and scones with that little typist you took to the flicks when you were last in Glasgow, Joe."

For a split second Dex wondered if Joe was, actually, going to fly at Polly; so dangerous had his green eyes momentarily become. But then he coughed, leant back against the back of the chesterfield, and gave her his edgy, glass-splintered grin again.

"Helen Adamson? She's some sort of cousin of Charlie Cook's. Nice kid. He asked me to look her up, since I was going to be in town."

Polly's face relaxed, suddenly. "Ah? I'd guessed it had to be something like that. Bad boy, Joe; you obviously made quite an impression on her. Broke her little heart, I shouldn't wonder. But I thought it didn't sound like you, chasing after some homely brunette with no figure and a nose stuck resolutely in some book all the time."

There was a speaking pause in the bothy.

Joe's voice purred. "Actually, I found her remarkably good company. Not that it's any of your business. As we agreed earlier. And anyway, you did promise to share your intelligence. If you would be so good -?"

He made a sweeping gesture.

Without more ado, Polly moved to the table and emptied the contents of her briefcase onto its scrubbed white planks.

"Here," she said. "I started off by trying to get a line on those guys you took on at the warehouse. The ones who lit out with the prototype when the British sailors started to raise the shindig."

Dex looked across in sudden alarm. "Joe; you didn't let them -?"

Joe made a Calm Down gesture with one hand. "Relax, Dex. Trust me. The security override circuit interlocks worked exactly like you told me they would. The guy who'd tried to power it up gave me his frank assessment of the results of his experiment. Most original command of the English language. Hadn't heard anything like it since my little white-haired old grandmother tripped over the cat and took the heel off her elastic-sided ankle boot. What the bad guys went to all that trouble and expense to steal, Dex, is now a nice little heap of slagged-to-bare-metal components, thanks to some genius's notion of introducing deliberate short circuits into the basic model, that you need to connect an add-on to overrride."

Despite all his worries, Dex exhaled with sheer relief. "Jeez, Cap, that's good to know."

Polly's expression lightened. "Oh, so that was what that was all about? I thought you'd taken leave of your senses when the four big guys were lugging the prototype out to the truck, and you chose to take off after the skinny ginger one."

Joe's smile had a feline edge. "Why, what did you think? That I'd decided I didn't fancy the odds and was choosing the better part of valour?"

Her expression was cool and unruffled."Something like that, yes. Of course, it managed to make a whole lot more sense as soon as I found out about the microfilm -"

Dex's brow furrowed in puzzlement. It sure seemed as if there were an awful lot of bits of the story that Joe hadn't got round to telling him earlier. Mind you - presumably he'd other things on his mind.

He failed entirely to suppress a small, secret, reminiscent smile.

Joe's lips curled in a sneer. "Hah! So you were listening in on the extension in the other room when I called Franky to tell her I'd got it back."

Polly shrugged, her expression completely indifferent. "Well, Joe; a girl's got to look out for herself if she's going to know where she stands round you."

Dex practically choked. He took a sip of water, and to cover his confusion, stuttered hurriedly, "What microfilm?"

Polly stared across at him in absolute bewilderment, while Joe raised his eyes to the ceiling in an elaborately theatrical, everyone's-an imbecile-but-me expression. "I know you had a lot to think about that evening, but surely you can't have forgotten that you told Franky about it yourself?"

Abruptly, humiliatingly, Dex cottoned on. His face flamed. "Oh, _that_ microfilm. Sorry, Cap. Still not over the flu, I guess."

Polly sniffed. "Well, I trust that between the two of you you've got it safe now."

Joe waved an airy hand. "Couldn't be safer if we'd forwarded it special express delivery to Hell, and asked Satan to take care of it in person."

Dex carefully avoided looking at the fireplace. Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of Joe giving him the faintest possible ghost of a wink. He ignored that, too. Joe's grin got deeper.

Polly coughed. "Well? Aren't you interested in what I found when I started ferreting around at the warehouse? After you'd all gone?"

Joe's face was suddenly very proper, attentive. "Of course, Polly. Fire away."

She dug into her handbag and, after a moment's searching pulled out a diminutive silver matchbox, embossed with a device which showed an eagle, wings spread in flight, carrying a gigantic thistle in its talons, superimposed against a terrestial globe.

Joe raised an eyebrow. "And? Have you been able to get any sort of line on what that's supposed to represent?"

This time Polly's smile did look a trifle smug. To be fair, Dex could hardly blame her. For a woman who was completely confuzzled by an action as basic as replacing a fuse, he had to give her credit for being unsurpassed in her own field."Oh, there's no mystery about it. Though it is very exclusive. Not at all the kind of little party favour you'd expect goons like that to keep in their pockets as a matter of course. Or even to be able to steal that readily, not having what you might call ready access to those kind of circles." She drew breath. "What that device is, is the symbol of the International Brotherhood of the New Jacobite Order."

"Well," Joe said, "I'm sure that's peachy for it. Or it would be if I'd ever heard of the International Brotherhood of the - whatchemacallit. Come out with it, Polly. Who are they, and what do they stand for?"

She shrugged; the firelight glinted off her hair. She must have had a tough journey through the storm-swept countryside outside, but her coiffure showed it less than it might. "Rich men's drinking club? International philanthropic society? A voluntary pooling of the most talented men in America and Europe in a global crusade against petty nationalism, war, unemployment? Or a gigantic conspiracy to overthrow democracy and set up a string of dictatorships and puppet governments. You take your pick; I've heard all those explanations."

She leaned forward towards Joe, her lovely face passionate, intent, on fire with the almost mesmeric concentration which always took possession of her when she was in pursuit of a story; or at least, Dex mentally corrected himself savagely, in pursuit of a story in the company of her beloved Sky Captain. He felt slightly ill; everything that had, or hadn't happened immediately before Polly's arrival seemed to have acquired a dream-like tinge, retreating into the world of fantasy before the vital reality of Polly's presence, and all she represented. The normal. The acceptable. The enviable. The unquestionably desirable. He tried not to look at Joe; Polly was beaming so much concentrated eligibility at him from such close quarters it was almost obscene. It seemed impossible that he wouldn't succumb.

Joe coughed, drily. "I suggest you tell us about the last one of those. Given what I've come across so far, it's the one I'm most inclined sit up and pay attention to at present."

Polly smiled, and relaxed back in the chair. "Really? Me too. You see, the men who gave me the first three didn't wind up dead in a street accident two hours later. After phoning me to arrange a rendezvous, but before we could meet."

One finger tapped down on a piece of lined paper torn from a cheap exercise book which sat at the top of the dossier. "Fortunately, he'd had the presence of mind to mail this to me before he died. A list of people who he'd linked to the Brotherhood, somehow."

Without consciously planning it that way, Joe and Dex moved simultaneously to the table, bending over the piece of paper, trying to decipher the scribbled list in the dimness of the bothy. Abruptly, Dex was conscious of just how close Joe was, of how he smelled - peat smoke, whisky, clean skin and soap - of how precisely sculptured the whorls of his left ear were, how the pulse looked as it throbbed in the hollow of his throat. Joe turned, some comment or other about the list dying in his throat as he caught sight of Dex's expression and a fierce, hungry spark lit in answer in the depths of his green eyes. 

Dex suddenly found it necessary to start working out a problem in differential calculus in his head right now. From what he could hear, Joe's breathing had practically stopped. 

"Yes," Polly said with an air of intense satisfaction, "I thought you'd find that particularly interesting."

Dex couldn't imagine anything he could say.

Joe swallowed; possibly accidentally his knee brushed against Dex's under the table. "Yes. Indeed. Be a good girl, Polly, and bring over that oil lamp. This list might be fascinating, but it's not that easy to read in this light."

With the only light source sitting on the table the rest of the kitchen subsided into mercifully impenetrable gloom. In any event Polly hadn't exaggerated; the list was sufficiently sensational to catch and hold their attention.

"Well. A lot of very, very wealthy men."

Polly nodded. "Notice something else?"

Joe nodded. "Hard to miss, isn't it? An awful lot of those names are airmen. Either that, or those who build planes. Some do both."

Dex looked down the list, trying to puzzle out the connections between the listed names.

"Not geographical," he muttered aloud. "Some Americans, couple of Canadians, a Frenchman. Not political, or social. After all, what's a British baronet going to have in common with a German from a manufacturing family?"

Polly leaned forward. "Which? Oh. Hermann Goering. Who -?"

"World War I ace." Dex and Joe spoke together. There was an awkward pause. Joe gestured for Dex to continue. He did so rapidly, stumbling over his words a little. "Insisted on flying an all-white plane. It always got said : if the Armistice hadn't been signed when it was, he'd have notched up more kills than both the brothers Von Richthoven combined."

"Said? Mainly by Hermann Goering, I think." Joe's expressive face was twisted up in a way which suggested someone had put a semi-decayed dead cat under his nose. A story there. Dex made a mental note to ask him about it some time when they got a chance.

Polly tapped her propelling pencil thoughtfully against her front teeth. "Of course," she said, "there's no reason just because someone's name's on this list that they're in it up to their necks - whatever it is. There's probably only a tiny core of real conspirators. There's going to be people in it who are just sleeping partners, maybe, just there to provide the finance; even, who knows, people who really believe the cover story, and are just being manipulated to give the whole thing credibility."

Dex unwrapped a sliver of gum and started to chew on it, nervously. 

"Cap: I really hope that he's one of those last lot." He pointed nervously to one of the Chronicle clippings in the dossier. The photograph was unmistakeable, but at the headline both Joe and Dex blenched.

"World-Famous Aviator Tours Legion Base: Comforts Metallic Monster Attack Survivors" the headline screamed. Below the photograph, which principally showed Lindbergh's autocratic profile, was a demure by-line: Polly Perkins.

Joe and Dex Looked at her. Under their withering, if unspoken criticism, she quailed.

"Look," she said, "I thought I was doing the best for you. You needed the publicity. So; he came, he toured, he pontificated. What harm?"

"Well," Joe said, "quite apart from anything else, I don't suppose you'd care to have the girl who was the rich spoilt kid in your class, whose Daddy always paid for everything, who got where you wanted to get to without ever having to do anything to earn it, not even sign the cheques, coming round in her mink to commiserate the very day after you'd been burgled, now would you, Polly?"

He paused. She looked at him and shrugged, indifferently; analogy, it seemed, wasn't a language she spoke. After a moment or so Joe gave in - was turning away - when Dex spotted something in the blurry background of the photograph. And gasped; not loud, but enough for Joe to notice. He turned back.

"What -?"

Dex's finger stabbed down. "Him - "

"You recognise him?"

Dex's voice choked up; he could barely stammer the words out. "Yes. It's him. You know, from the - uh - microfilm -"

He prayed desperately Joe would be acute enough not to ask further questions. Not here, not now. Under the table, Joe's leg brushed against his again; not at all accidentally, it would seem. The warm pressure was reassuring. Joe's voice was matter-of-fact.

"Polly, do you remember this guy? From the visit? His name, even?"

Her forehead creased in thought. "Stillman? Something like that, anyway. He was some sort of gofer in the Lindbergh party." There was a pause, as though a light was going on inside her head. "Actually, there was something - I remember now - he was the guy who got faint, touring the hangar, and had to go and lie down - we were having a couple days of Indian summer and it got real hot in there -"

"Where, Polly?" Joe's voice was low and deadly. "Where did they put him to recover?"

Dex licked his lips nervously; to someone who knew the base as well as he did there was only one likely place. The worst possible in the circumstances he now suspected, especially since all the men who could make an excuse to do so would have been distracted by the shindig of the official party, and tagging along with them, rather than scattered all around the base, like they would have been on a normal day.

"Why, that little sick room on the hangar floor," Polly said, just as he could have predicted. Joe's face lit with a flash of savagery. The sickroom was tucked right under the flight of wooden stairs that led up to Joe's own office - on the generally sensible basis that sick people needed peace and quiet, and if the close proximity of the Base Commander couldn't ensure that, it was a pretty poor lookout all round.

"About how long would he have been there, Polly? And was anyone with him?"

She shook her head. "Someone got him a drink of water and an aspirin, I think, and then they just left him until the party was ready to go. I suppose, with one thing and another - perhaps an hour and a quarter? An hour and a half, tops."

Joe looked at Dex, whose stomach was plummeting down towards his boots. He nodded in answer to the unspoken question in Joe's face.

"Long enough, if he knew what he was about."

Polly tapped her nail impatiently on the table. "Long enough for what?"

"To break into the office and crack the safe there," Dex said bleakly. "If they knew to look there - once they worked out the prototype couldn't be safely used without the security interlocks."

"Grogan." Joe almost spat the word. "He was hanging about after I'd had my first meeting with Davies. I remember now - he said something stupid to me, just as I was going up into my office. And I checked the safe straight away to see that no-one had touched the blue-prints and the security interlocks then - and perhaps he saw or heard me going to the safe. And when the prototype self-destructed, he worked out where the missing piece had to be. He was a bright class of lad, Grogan, for all he was a yellow traitor."  
Joe got to his feet. "There's only one way to find out. I'm going to have to get to somewhere where I can send an encrypted transatlantic cable. I need to get someone I can trust to take a look at that safe, and see if it really has been forced. And what's missing if it has. And do a dust for prints." He was shrugging into his flying jacket as he spoke.

"I'm coming with you," Polly said.

Joe raised an eyebrow. "Don't be ridiculous. The weather's twice as bad now as when I came over the Rest and Be Thankful the first time, and I didn't have a pillion passenger then, and the locals still thought it was tantamount to suicide; you ask Dex."

She pouted. "I don't have to ride pillion; I hired a car in Glasgow when I set off after you yesterday afternoon. It's down at the bottom of the track; I wasn't at all sure I'd find anywhere I could turn round if I carried on uphill."

"You wouldn't have. It ends in a waterfall and a sheep-track about a hundred yards past the bothy." He paused, and added pointedly, "The much-vaunted "seclusion from the unwelcome intrusion of everyday life" which was one of the key features that sold me on this little retreat. Given the number of visitors who've stumbled through today I feel rather like writing a stiff letter to _The Times_ about Truth in Advertising. Anyway, you have a car? That's good. Two-seater, I take it? You can give Dex a lift. There's a guy in Glasgow he needs to talk to urgently."

"Wha-?" 

Joe turned to face him. "If the - International Brotherhood, or whatever they call themselves, has got the members they seem to have, then they aren't going to be playing for peanuts. And I don't suppose they've gone to all this trouble to steal the prototype if they just want an nice ornament for their mantelpiece, either. How long, do you reckon, in your professional judgement would it take them to build a usable weapon, given the interlocks and the real blue-prints?"

Dex bit his lip nervously. "If it were me, without the background know-how - say a week? Ten days?"

"Hm." Joe's eyes narrowed in concentration. "And since we can assume that they're able to pay for the best engineers they can get, I don't think we can rely on more than three weeks or at best a month before they've got the weapon in their hands, then. And in that time we've got to try and work out what their target's going to be. And - since this clearly isn't Bolsheviks or the Red Menace, the authorities - whichever side of the Atlantic - are going to treat these gentry with kid gloves. We need all the help we can get. And McAllister's a good man, with a lot of influence in odd places, and his ear to the ground. And he's got a workshop at his disposal, too."

Dex nodded; it made perfect sense, even if being driven back to Glasgow through a howling gale by Polly was not in the least how he'd have preferred to spend what remained of the evening. But Joe was right; the news that the safe might have been compromised (and, he thought fiercely, not through his own folly, thank God) changed everything; the personal was a luxury none of them had time for now.

"And what about me?"

Joe looked at Polly, and smiled. "Well, don't you think it's about time you started to investigate some of the names on this list? And since you're on the right side of the Atlantic as it is, why don't you start with -" His finger landed squarely on the paper. "Our friend the English baronet."

Polly spread her hands helplessly. "And how do you suggest I go about that, then? "Hello, Sir Mosley, I'm just over from the States, and I wanted to interview you about this international conspiracy you seem to be part of?" Something like that?"

Joe's smile had something devilish about it. "Not quite. You see, this particular baronet - and it's "Sir Oswald" not "Sir Mosley", Polly, you'll have to mug up on that sort of thing if you're going to be mixing in those sort of circles - just happens to have a distinguished war record. In the RFC. Which means while I don't happen to know him myself, I most certainly know a man who will. As soon as I can put through a call to Leicestershire, I bet Charlie Cook will have an idea about how best to introduce you to him."

He cast a quick impersonal glance over both of them. "Anyway, I'd best be on my way. See you two at the aerodrome."

He was gone without a backwards glance, and the roar of the motorcycle soon faded into the noise of the storm. Polly stood by the table, tapping her heel impatiently, as Dex threw the mixed heap of clothes he'd been able to sweep up into his kitbag, doused the fire, and, before quenching the lamp, allowed himself a last, thorough, unobtrusive look around the bothy, as though every last whitewashed stone of the place would not be permanently imprinted on his memory for as long as he might live.


	12. Joe and Dex are forced to separate to tackle the growing threat to world peace. When will they be reunited?

The long-distance line crackled repressively; already they had been interrupted by the operator asking if they wanted a further three minutes. Joe repressed an urge to stamp a booted foot while trying to get his point over to the remote presence on the far end of the phone.

"Why do you want to get to know this fellow Mosley, anyway?" Charlie demanded. "From what I can remember of him from the RFC he's a total stumer. Borrowed a tenner off me on Armistice Night. Which he's yet to return. Besides selling me a hunter that broke down a fortnight later with a chronic wheeze, when he'd assured me on his honour that she was as sound as a bell."

Charlie emitted a peculiarly British "harrumph!" sound. "Won't do you any good with m'sister if you go taking up with him, either. I understand she had her own run-in with him, at some tamasha in Malta. Chap apparently made an improper suggestion to her in the rose-garden of the Governor's Residence. Didn't behave like a gentleman at all."

"If I know Franky, I'll bet neither did she," Joe observed.

Charlie's grin was clearly audible in his voice, even over the dreadful connection. "You could have something there. At least: so far as I know he's definitely preferred blondes ever since."

Joe's eyebrows rose. "Does he indeed? Charlie, you interest me strangely."

There was an audible sigh. "All right, Joe. If you insist. I suppose you've got a reason. Tell me what you need for an introduction?"

"Is there any sort of big event coming up, one that he's bound to be at? Sort of thing where we'll pass in a crowd, not look noticeable? Where someone might get acquainted with him, if you introduced them?"

Without warning, a highly refined voice cut across their conversation. Joe broke off to inform Our Lady of the Switchboard pointedly that yes, indeed, he was aware of what the current conversation was doing to his bank balance, and, notwithstanding that, he did believe he wanted it to continue for at least another three minutes longer, yes. It had not been an unproductive pause; Charlie, in the interim, had clearly been thinking.

"Well; there's the Hunt Ball. On Friday. The full season starts next week. The Brigadier's on the committee; he's been pestering me to take tickets for weeks. I doubt he's left the Mosleys alone - they've rented a place over Melton way for the season, I think - and someone with political ambitions can't afford to miss an event like that; half the Cabinet will be there, to say nothing of a few choice members of the House of Lords."

"And are you going?"

"To a dance? Me?" Charlie's voice was loaded with incredulity. "Aren't you forgetting something?"

"Why not? Doesn't sound to have stopped the Brigadier. And anyway, Charlie, you were famous for not dancing at dances even when you did dance. What's to stop you spending half the evening in the bar, and then vanishing off with the prettiest girl in the place, same as you always did?"

Charlie's voice was bitter. "Pretty girls go for dashing young airmen, not crippled old crocks."

His defeatism stung Joe into contradiction."And have you tried actually proving whether that's true? Or are you just going to hole up and watch your house crumble about you, while assuming that there's nothing left in life for you?"

There was a slightly shocked pause, and then, "Excuse my asking, but are you in love, Joe, by any chance?" Charlie enquired.

"What!?" He checked himself. "What makes you ask?"

"Oh, just this thing Franky said, when Iphigenia got engaged. She said that one of the first signs, before the announcement was that she immediately started trying to fix up all her friends and relations with someone of their own, too. 'More contagious than cholera' was how Franky put it."

"Yes; it was always your sister's delicacy of expression I found most attractive," Joe said, rather desperately trying to deflect Charlie's unexpected perceptiveness. "Anyway, I'm not standing here paying the Post Office God-knows how many shillings per minute so we can dissect my love life. This is fate of the world stuff -"

"Again?" Charlie enquired.

Joe ignored him. "So, frankly, Charlie, I'll consider it pretty poor of you to stand in the way of doing anything you can to help unravel the plot, even if it does mean hanging around at some dance or other being bored to tears. It's only one evening of your life, Charlie, for God's sake, and anyway, what else did you have planned for next Friday?"

There was a brief pause. 

"I'll see what I can do," Charlie said in a resigned voice, and hung up.

Joe stepped out of the little mahogany cubicle which housed the telephone at the aerodrome in a thoughtful mood. And then there was a stir across at the far door, and a flurry of activity from the few men who were working here so late. Polly must have arrived.

As indeed she had.

With a flicker of irritation he noted that she'd evidently talked Dex into carrying her luggage. He was trailing in her wake, loaded up like a beast of burden; evidently the concept of "travelling light" still hadn't got through to her. And then Joe consciously checked his irritation - or at least, his urge to express it. After all, if Charlie, who had never been noted for being the most perceptive of men, could have picked up that there was something going on in about five minutes from the wrong end of a terrible telephone line, perhaps Joe better had work on cultivating a bit more discretion. 

It wasn't a quality he'd ever rated very highly; briefly his lips curled up in a wry twist as he considered whether earlier attention to discretion might not have avoided some of his problems in Nanjing - but in the current circumstances he didn't really see any option.

His voice was consciously bright and sparkling as he greeted Polly and Dex - avoiding Dex's eye - and said, "I hope you packed a ballgown or two, Polly. I'm taking you to a dance."

Dex dropped the bags in the place indicated by Polly's gesturing hand, muttered something about "jobs to see to," and vanished into the deeper recesses of the base. Joe watched him go with a worried frown, realised he was frowning, and turned his attention resolutely back to Polly again, only to find Polly was looking in the same direction.

"You know, I really don't think Dex was well enough for the drive over from that cottage place. He hardly said a thing, the whole trip. And when he did say anything, it didn't seem to connect to anything that went before. If you want my opinion, he should be in bed."

 _Preferably mine_ , the bit of Joe's brain that hadn't yet been circulated with the discretion memo chimed in hopefully, before he mentally retrieved himself from an inexorable downward plummet.

"I'm sure you're right. I'll make a point of telling him. But anyway, there are some spares I need to get hold of for the plane; and things signed off and suchlike before we fly. Shall I organise someone to get you a cup of tea while I sort it? It's going to be a long cold flight. And the drive can't have been that good for you, either."

She turned up to him in the bright lights of the hangar with a grateful eagerness that made him feel almost guilty."Thanks, Joe. I'd really appreciate that."

The nightshift was, as he expected, crammed into their own cubby-hole listening to croon-moon-June songs from a Victrola and downing tea and biscuits while playing canasta. He introduced her, chatted inconsequentially with them for a few moments and bolted; left to herself she would charm the socks off them in five seconds, as he well knew, rendering his presence more than surplus to requirements. Anyway, he had other fish to fry.

At the far end of the hangar by his plane he saw Dex putting down a spanner and closing the engine casing; clearly he'd not been prepared to take the service registers on trust before allowing Joe to take off again. Joe had got close before he risked a word.

"Dex?"

Dex's face was remote; evidently he was keeping his feelings compressed."What?"

Joe gulped, apologetically. "We're flying out in the next half-hour or so. But I need some stores. Can you help me find them, and then write me the right chits for the ‘drome? After all, you're bound to know your way round the storeroom backwards, and it'll stop me having to roust someone out. And the nightshift are idiots, like always."

Dex nodded. "OK. Suppose we try through here."

He trotted determinedly over towards another corner of the hangar. Joe followed Dex through the door marked "Stores". Given the size of the place, he had to admit it was impressively well-stocked, and organised with a remarkable attention to logic.

Dex turned in the gloom, and chewed his lip nervously. "So, Cap, which spares were you looking for?"

It was like the moment of take-off, he was light as air, he was accelerating wildly into the void.

"Well," Joe drawled, allowing his whole body to relax, so that he moved as though disjointed, "I think I can get hold of the left-handed spanner quite quickly, but finding the long weight could take me some time."

Time stopped.

Dex spun towards him on the spot, and Joe was waiting; he caught him and pressed him violently back into the shelves of the Stores, rubbing his hard, aroused body against him as he flung himself into the kiss. His lips parted and his tongue sought out Dex's mouth. Dex's right hand came up, roughly cupping Joe's jaw, pulling his head down towards his frantic lips, whilst his left hand slipped down to rub Joe's hardness through his pants.

It was an infinity of time; it was the briefest of times. Their bodies were pressed close against each other, their blood thundered in their ears, their sweat smelled hot in each other's nostrils. It seemed as though they could embrace each other for ever.

Joe broke away. "Oh, God: I just wish - I wish I had two spare hours with you, and a door with a lock that worked. Look Dex; I only want - I mean - look - don't go forgetting me while I'm away."

"Forget - ?" Dex's eyes were bright with incredulity; it tore at his heart. And then Dex's mouth was there again, feather-light on aching lips, and he clung to Dex with a bruising tightness, not wanting to let him go after finding him so late, despite everything, knowing he must go, and go now. And everything was, after all, so complicated, and so sudden. And he ought to say something. And he had never been good with words.

"Look after yourself," he said meaninglessly, and turned away, out of the Stores, towards his plane. 

"And you, " he thought he heard behind him on the wind, but couldn't be sure. 

Polly had been escorted to the plane by half the night-shift: they had competed for the privilege. She looked down at him from her enthronement in the passenger seat.

"Oh, Joe!" she said in a tone of exasperated protectiveness, "I can't imagine how you managed to get engine oil all over yourself in thirty seconds. And how on earth could you have got it there? Look. Bend down. At least I can do something to sort that mess on your face."

She whipped out a handkerchief, and licked it with all the enthusiasm of a mother cat. Given the wherewithal, she briskly polished his face for him.

"There!" she said, leaning back a little and surveying his face with an indulgent smile. "That's much better."

Joe grinned, catapulted himself into the pilot seat, and as he readied the plane for take-off had one thought in the forefront of his mind.

His current situation might be confused, unprecedented, messy, illegal, prejudicial to good order and discipline and, on current form, as frustrating as all hell. But there was one thing to be said for it; it had unquestionable advantages. He ran a reminiscent hand along the line of his jaw. His grin deepened, and he took off into the night.

[ Link to Part III here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2406443/chapters/5322092)

**Author's Note:**

> For fanon-related reasons Prohibition is still continuing in America.  Characters based on historical originals express views believed to be those of the originals concerned, as they might have been affected by historical shifts.


End file.
